


Woven From Your Brown Hair

by Hannah



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autism, Autistic Character, Canon Character of Color, Disability, Gen, Jewish Identity, Jews In Space, Judaism, Neurodiversity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-07 18:02:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 34
Words: 90,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4272804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Innogen Bashir had always known exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She’d planned it out in early childhood and made sure to do whatever she could to keep everything on that path: pursue design as a vocation, move to London and take a job at a prestigious firm, marry the woman of her dreams and create a body of work that would live on long after her, and to top it off, still have time to go out dancing. That was her plan.</p><p>But as the saying goes, when man makes plans, God laughs.</p><p>(Sidestory/prequel to Stubborn Mouths: Humans In Translation.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Humour Of The Situation

Innogen knew that if she’d been alone, she wouldn’t have laughed. But she hadn’t been. If she’d read the news on a screen, she might just have smiled. She felt that in her defense, it hadn’t been a big laugh. A chuckle, some giggling, nothing more than that, and given that the situation which brought it on was hearing a dour-faced, plain-clothed man and woman who had introduced themselves as Agents Walden and Channahon, respectively. They’d told her that she had to come with them because the news she would receive couldn’t be delivered in an unsecure location, which was too much on top of the day she’d been having. A little laughter seemed like a reasonable response.

“My apologies. Sorry.” She finally managed to stop smiling. “It’s just, ‘you need to come with us,’” she said, mimicking Channahon’s flat, deadpan delivery. “All the movies say that, and hearing it from you, right now, if this is some sort of set-up Carson thought –”

“This isn’t a set-up, gag, joke, trick, prank, or punchline, Miss Bashir,” Channahon said. “We’re being entirely serious, and you need to come with us. You need to come with us now. The sooner, the better.”

“Now. Right now?”

“Right now.”

“I – all right.” She glanced back into the room where she’d been delivering a presentation. The first big solo presentation of her career. She’d not yet been trusted to lead a presentation and be the agency’s direct representative, and knew if it didn’t go well today she might never be again. “Give me two minutes, I just need –”

“Now, Miss Bashir,” Walden said.

“Give me two minutes,” she repeated. “Let me – let me get my things, please.”

“We’re coming with you,” he said, and they held themselves to that, hovering as Innogen took an extra minute to clean off her desk as though the end of the working day had come four hours early. Walking into the offices with them following her didn’t feel quite as bad as the two of them leading her out, as though she didn’t know the way. Leaving the lift, it was Walden following and Channahon leading, Innogen in between them. The automobile was large enough for two sets of seats facing each other, very much like a fancy taxicab, and the two agents watched Innogen look out the window as they were taken from her offices through the heart of London, south across the Thames over to Elephant And Castle, into a garage of a fairly nondescript building. It was Channahon ahead and Walden behind again as they walked through the lobby, checked her in through security and lead her to an office with a name on the door she only got to glimpse before they more or less shoved her inside. They hung back and almost disappeared into the wallpaper, all but leaving her alone in Victor Nashimura’s company.

He nodded at the door and they closed it carefully behind them. Innogen turned to Nishimura, and before he had a chance to open his mouth, she said, “Is this secure enough I can find out what’s going on?”

“Ah – yes. This is, Miss Bashir.”

“Good. Then I’d appreciate someone getting around to telling me just what that is.”

“Please, if you’d let me start by saying how sorry I am that this is happening to your family…” he trailed off, and then blinked at Innogen’s hard stare back. “Is something wrong?”

“No, I’m just waiting for you to finish.”

“All right…I’m sorry this is all happening to your family. This isn’t something anyone should ever have to consider dealing with, and I wish I had something more to give you. We’re in a rather delicate situation at the moment. If we thought we could wait a little longer, we would have, but with the individuals involved we thought –”

“Should I go? Should I go grab something to drink or make us some tea while you get things in order and come back when you do?”

“Miss Bashir, please. I’m trying to let you know –”

“You’re not doing a particularly good job of it.”

He didn’t quite glare at her, but his face went still and cold, lips tightening and then releasing, eyes narrowing and staying there. “Your brother and his wife were arrested this morning.”

Innogen nodded, keeping her face empty while her guts flipped like she’d just ascended the apex of a roller-coaster. “Pardon?”

“They’ve been charged and taken into custody, and are currently awaiting trial.”

“They were charged – do you mean _both_ of them?”

“We’re in a somewhat delicate situation. They’ve not yet been –”

“If they’ve been arrested, why couldn’t you just have told me that? Or someone just have said so before? What could they possibly have been even _accused_ of to be arrested over?”

“The nature of their crime is such that we’ve decided to wait in regards to informing people outside of a need-to-know basis, to prevent any backlash or public worry. The reason you’ve been informed now,” he held up his hand when she leaned forward and opened her mouth, “the reason we’ve brought you here to tell you right away is because you’ve been assigned custody of their child.”

“Could you please say that again?”

“Their son, ah, Julian, you’re listed as his next-of-kin. As such, his custody has been transferred from his parents over to you for the duration.”

“This duration – so while his parents – excuse me.” She clenched her fists. “Sorry. When does this begin?”

“When does what begin?”

“Julian. My being in charge of his custody. When does that start?”

“It started as soon as his parents were arrested.”

“No, really. When does it begin? I assume there’s a waiting period, there must be forms I’ve got to sign. What if I waited to sign them? Just for a few hours?”

“Why would you do that?”

“I can’t take Julian tonight,” Innogen said. “I can come back tomorrow and get him first thing in the morning, but I can’t start tonight.”

“No, that’s what’s happened. Technically, he entered your care about two hours ago, at the time of the arrest.”

“It couldn’t have.”

“It did,” Nishimura said. “That’s the nature of the process.”

“No, you don’t understand. It couldn’t have. I’m busy tonight. I can’t start tonight.”

“I don’t see how arguing with –”

“I can’t take him yet,” Innogen pressed, leaning forward in what she hoped was an endearing manner, the better to make him understand her desperation as she felt the floor drop from under her. As she went weightless from the fall. “I’m going out dancing tonight. I’ve been invited to go out dancing, this is a date, you know how people have those out in the real world? I’ve got one for tonight that I’ve been waiting a week to get to and let me tell you, trust me when I say Miranda will have my hide if she knows I cancelled on her for this, she’ll have it something terribly fierce, so I can’t start tonight. Tomorrow, but not tonight.” She looked around at all the naked, empty faces. “I could take him as soon as I’m back from dancing, that’s not even too long a wait, I could even leave early.”

“Miss Bashir, I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“But it…I…I’m supposed to go out dancing.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Bashir, but this is what’s happened.”

She felt the world on impact when it came up to greet her from the fall. “I don’t understand.”

“Is there anything I can help with?”

“I doubt it. Maybe. I don’t know. Is there anything on why it’s me?”

“I assume because Julian’s parents like you.”

“No, I mean – no, never mind what I mean.” She pulled back, closed her eyes, took a moment to get the words together inside her head. “What I mean to ask is, why not someone else? Why not his grandparents? His parents liked them fine.”

“I really can’t say. I can’t say because I didn’t ask either of them why they decided on you for this role instead of his grandparents. If it goes well, you should be able to talk to them soon, and you could ask them then.”

“How soon? No, wait. You can’t say.” Nishimura shrugged and nodded. “Good God, what else is there, then.”

“There, ah, there actually are a few forms you need to sign.”

“Splendid. Have you got them here? I’ll just…I’ll just finish those up now, why don’t I.”

He handed her a number of padds, and she pressed her thumb or signed her name where appropriate, barely skimming through the words, not even lingering on some of the more unsavory ones with their far-reaching implications – _incarceration, duration, guardianship_ – until she got to the form detailing _possessions, ownership, estate._ “So I get their house as well as their son?”

“Not quite. As I said, they’ve been arrested and charged, not tried and convicted. Their assets have been frozen, and depending on the outcome of the trial, we’ll follow the appropriate set of procedures, which might well include an estate transfer. But currently, you’re the –”

“But it might _not._ ”

“Well, yes. That’s true, it might not.”

“Not…oh.” There was that weightlessness again, except this time the earth came up to meet her right away. The force of impact opened her mouth and forced out her words. “What have his parents been charged for?” When no one answered right away, Innogen fought to keep her face from moving. Nothing good would come out of that sort of silence.

“I’m afraid we can’t say just yet,” Walden told her.

“Are you waiting for a newspaper to pick up a hot tip?”

Walden and Channahon looked at Innogen, and then each other, and then back at Innogen, wearing identically undecipherable expressions. It was Channahon who said, “When you’re allowed to know, you’ll be informed of the full charges.”

“Forgive me, but that’s not quite the answer I’d anticipated,” Innogen managed to force out.

“For the moment, it’s the answer I’m afraid you’re going to have to satisfy yourself with.”

“Right. Yes. If I can ask. Where’s Julian right now?”

“He’s, ah, he’s…”

“Is he here? In the building, here?”

“No, he isn’t. He’s still in Guildford right now, and we thought –”

“All right. If there’s something else I can ask. Why is it that he wasn’t brought here, if I’m his current legal guardian and technically took custody two hours ago?”

“We thought it’d be easier for everyone if he wasn’t moved just yet, and that you’d appreciate being informed first.”

“You thought – right. Of course you did.” The bear of the situation was that she _did_ appreciate having being informed, and with the sort of child Julian was, staying at home for a few hours longer would make everything easier for everyone. “I assume you’re giving me a lift over there.”

“If you’d like us to, we could arrange –”

“Yes. Please do, yes. I’ll just stop at my house first, to pack up a suitcase – it’s all right that I stop long enough to pack a suitcase? I assume it’s going to be an overnight stay at the very least.” Innogen knew she’d leave the office, and the building, with the reputation of _troublesome_ at best and _pushy rude arse_ at worst, and it didn’t even bother her overmuch. It didn’t bother her when Channahon and Walden came with her for the ride to her house, came inside her house as she packed her suitcase for four nights and days, and didn’t even speak to her on the ride from London out to Guildford. It took a little more than an hour, and in that time, none of them said anything, which sat fine by her. There wasn’t anything polite she had to say. She was happy to watch the landscape slide by, doing her best to appreciate the novelty of an automobile ride.

There wasn’t any conversation until they reached their destination. There were more agents in and around the house, enough that she couldn’t quite register their faces as she went inside – a tall woman with a mane of dreadlocks, a blond man with an insincere smile, another man who didn’t meet her eyes – and couldn’t quite take in the chaos. Everything blended together to inform her it was all bad news, everything from the padds carried around and consulted, the bare snatches of general noise and sounds and talk, someone pushing her aside to carry out a file of paper documents to one of the parked vehicles lining the street and making her fumble back and almost hit the wall. The inside of the house looked like the climax of the oddest spy film yet to be made, not quite ransacked but filled with a subdued chaos filtering throughout that wasn’t clearing up. It wasn’t quite ruined, but in more than enough disarray to indicate the owners weren’t coming back anytime soon. Innogen tried to take it all in and then gave up, and let it wash over her as she walked upstairs, down the hallway, as she made her way through the chaos to Julian’s bedroom, where she waited a moment before she opened the door and went inside. 

He was sitting alone on the floor, clutching a stuffed bear to his chest and rocking back and forth very slightly, seemingly oblivious to the noise and hubbub in the rest of the house. Possibly letting it all flow over him as Innogen had let it, possibly not hearing it at all, but he glanced her way, flicking his eyes towards her for a moment, when she closed the door behind her and said, “Hello, Julian.”

“Aunt Innogen,” he said in return.

“Here I am.” She looked around for a chair and finally sat on the floor in front of him, searching his face for some hint he understood what was happening; he kept his eyes away from her, looking to the ceiling or the floor, never settling anywhere and especially never settling on her face. He didn’t look so different from when she’d last seen him almost two years ago; he hadn’t spoken much then, either. “Julian, are you – how are you?”

“Mum’s not here.”

“No, no she isn’t. But you, are you doing all right? How are you feeling?” she pressed.

“Mum’s not here,” he repeated, more firmly.

“All right. We’ve established that, now we can move on. And –”

“Miss Bashir?” A knock on the door, and the woman spoke again, “If you could come out here, please?”

“A moment, if that’s all right!” She called out, then looked back at Julian, who had pulled in his legs to sit tailor-style, turning away from the door to face the windows instead. “I’ll be back in just a moment, all right?” He didn’t move, then shivered, and nodded. “All right, then.” She took a moment to smooth back her hair, and then went out into the hallway, where she was greeted by a short woman with an undercut and the blond man with the insincere smile, Court and Stevenson.

“I’m sorry if we disturbed you,” Court said, “but as we’ve nearly finished seizing the assets, if you would come with us, please –” 

“Seizing the _what_? What do you _mean_ , seizing the assets? I thought you weren’t touching the estate. I’ve missed something, haven’t I? What am I missing here?”

“The estate itself, the property and furniture and the whole of it, yes. The relevant information for the case found within the estate, transaction documentation and correspondences, no. Sorry for the confusion. Industry jargon, you know how it can be,” Stevenson said with a flat American accent. “In any case. We need to ask you a few questions to be certain we haven’t missed anything.”

“Anything like what?”

“Contact information. Credit transfers. Things of that nature.”

“And you think I’d be able to help you with that.”

“Yes,” Stevenson said.

“Do you honestly think that –”

“Got it!” Someone shouted from down the hall, someone who almost sprinted to move downstairs just that much faster than walking, who didn’t notice everyone following her, a woman with a tight bun and a datalens over her left eye smiling in satisfaction. “I’ve got it all. Access to everything you’d wanted.”

“That didn’t take very long,” Channahon said.

“Not when you know what you’re doing.”

“Did you transfer it all yet?” she asked.

“On it.”

“Good. Get it all together, get the back-ups some back-ups, and then get someone in here to take this with us.”

“Take it with you?” Innogen asked.

“On that too,” the woman said.

“Hang on, what do you _mean_ , take it with you?”

“We mean exactly what we said, Miss Bashir,” Walden told her. “We mean, taking it with us. There’s a good chance to reverse-route the source of –”

“The source of what? Pretend for a moment I’m not a part of this legal extraction team and don’t know what anyone is talking about, just a moment, this one will be fine. What are you going to be taking?”

“Please, we need you to stay calm if we’re going to get anything done. Don’t worry. We’re not taking the comm itself. We’re going to lock it down for the duration, monitor all incoming and outgoing messages, just the standard procedure.” 

“You’re talking about the _house’s comm_. How do you expect me to do _any_ sort of communication if you’ve seized it for wherever it is you’re taking with you?”

Everyone looked at her, and then the datalens woman shrugged. “There’s a public library nearby,” and with that, everyone went back to their work.

“Can’t you at least let me get directions?” Innogen called to her.

She didn’t stop walking as she tossed back, “I’ll get right on that for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Miss Bashir?” Stevenson called. “That conversation we were having?”

“Oh? Oh, yes, let’s just get on with that, shall we?” She didn’t look at them as she marched out, didn’t look to see them following her back upstairs, back to the little nook where they’d been talking, and only turned around when she ran out of house. “You were asking me if I had any intel on them? Any good data, maybe a lead or two?”

“Not that crass, please,” Court said. “But yes.”

“My answer to all that is _no_. It’d be fantastic for everyone here, and I mean everyone, in this house and the police and the – whatever you’re calling them, suspects, criminals, for Julian’s parents too, if I could. But I don’t. I can’t. I only found out they’d done something illegal three hours ago, barely three hours ago, I’d never had any idea beforehand there was anything remotely criminal going on, I don’t even know their charges.”

“Did they ever speak to you about their son?” Stevenson asked.

“What? No, not really. Not a great deal.”

“Please tell me what you mean by not a great deal.” He looked at Innogen with a strange intensity, and she had to look away for a moment to regain her footing before looking him in the eyes again, deliberately and consciously.

“Just, not a great deal. They said recently, by which I mean a few weeks ago, they were hopeful for him in school next year. They don’t talk about him much right now. Not of late, except to talk about his future. There’s really nothing. They never talked to me about him, and believe it or not, I was actually pretty fine with that, let them get our parents a grandchild, not me, I’ve got plenty to do already, thanks, if they’ve been planning anything there’s no bloody way I’d have been included in any of it, and I wasn’t, trust me and thank you.”

The two agents glanced at each other.

“Works for me,” Court said. Stevenson just shrugged.

“Wait. Is that it for me?”

“Yes. In regards to our investigation, we’d just wanted to make sure you weren’t involved in the – in the case in any way. That’s all.”

“Oh.” She nodded slowly. “So do I thank you?”

“You can if you like,” Stevenson said.

“I’d really rather not…”

“Suit yourself.” They walked away before Innogen could say anything more. She leaned back against the wall, taking deep, even breaths to keep her heart going in a steady rhythm; she felt her hands craving a warm mug of tea to wrap around, so she went to find the house’s replicator. Back downstairs, she found the dining area easily enough, a table and the appropriate number of chairs for a small family with some left over for company, but no replicator to go along with it. Instead, there was a stove, a refrigerator, a sink, cabinets and drawers holding things like pots and pans and knives and salt. It was more than a dining area; it was a kitchen. She knew she shouldn’t be so surprised: she’d been told about it before, but it hadn’t been something she’d ever bothered to put together inside her head. The last time Julian’s parents had come to visit her, nearly four years ago, they’d talked about having to wait on all the work being done in their house, all the work that had gone into the room Innogen was standing inside. She’d asked them why they’d decided to do so much work on a perfectly acceptable house when neither of them cooked; Julian’s mother had smiled and said she was going to start cooking for Julian’s sake. It was supposed to be healthier for young children to eat handmade food. She’d been certain about that, very nearly adamant.

Even so, Innogen remembered from the time she’d dated Portia just because she’d cooked. Innogen had liked how exotic it was to have a restaurant experience in an ordinary Poplar flat, but for all the fuss Portia had made over eating handmade food, she’d still kept her replicator. Much as Portia had wanted to give it up completely, the apparent difficulty of sourcing certain ingredients for just one to two people at a time meant she hadn’t been able to.

A search of each and every possible location, even the cutlery drawers, eventually revealed the utility replicator hidden away inside one of the cabinets in such a way that it looked as though even owning it had been considered very nearly shameful. In the context of the rest of the room, of the stove she avoided stepping near and the refrigerator containing raw ingredients and handmade food alike, it might well have been.

Her hands finally safely wrapped around the desired mug of tea, she leaned against the counter and took a long, relaxing sip. She took a moment to stop, to simply stand there in the kitchen and drink her tea until she’d finished it.

Then she went upstairs to check on Julian.


	2. Half A Heart

The library was all of eight streets away, and small-town ones at that, nothing grand or dangerous about them. She hardly needed directions, just a few up and then a right and they were there. That, and Julian had led her the whole way there. It hadn’t been deliberate; it’d just been easier to keep track of him by walking a half-step behind, and he’d never once looked back to see if she was there, just walked on ahead deliberately, ignoring everyone and everything around him and in his path to focus on getting there that much faster.

When they arrived, she didn’t think she could blame him. It was a gorgeous building, only a century old, and very forward-thinking in its construction: natural light suffused the place, skylights and soft-textured glass doing much of the work. Much as she would have liked to linger and run her hands over the windows to really get a sense of how they did their job, there were other things she had to take care of first.

The children’s section was always the section with the most physical books available for its patrons, regardless of their research interests or specialties. It always had a little something for everyone, and Julian knew the way there, too, Innogen not needing to do anything more than ask him if he knew where it was before following him there.

“Now, this won’t be long,” she said, dropping to a crouch to meet Julian’s eye-level, even if his eyes wouldn’t meet her own. “I’m going to send a few notes at the public comm terminals, across the way over there, you know where those are?” He nodded. “Good. Just stay here and read something, stay out of trouble, and I’ll be back to pick you up soon, all right?” Julian nodded again. “Good.” Innogen stood up and rolled out her shoulders. “Don’t go anywhere without me.”

“Yes, Aunt Innogen.”

“Okay.” 

She was in the process of signing up on the waitlist for the comms when someone behind her cleared their throat. Then they did it again, louder, enough that she could tell it was a man who wanted her attention. Innogen sighed, finished writing in her last name, and turned around to face the music. The librarian didn’t have a nametag, or a smile.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” she replied.

“I take it that you’re new to our branch.”

“You do. You do correctly.”

“If you’ve plans to use it often, I recommend registering your card – I assume you have a card – with our local system.”

“I don’t, but thank you.”

“I see. Now, as you’re not used to our system, you might not be well aware of our policies.”

“I doubt I am.”

“Then in that case, I feel obligated to inform you of one of our more stringent ones.”

“Please do, then.”

“Parents aren’t allowed to use our facilities as daycare options.”

“Ah.”

“So if you’d be kind enough as to collect your child –”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I just can’t do that.”

“Excuse me?”

“The child you saw me dropping off? He’s not my child.”

“Oh?”

Innogen bit her tongue to keep from smiling, and when she felt collected enough, said, “No, I’m afraid he isn’t. Not my child at all. So if you’d be kind enough to let me get back – and a terminal just opened up. Lovely. If you’d let me get to what I came in here to do, the sooner I’ll be out, with him, so if you’ll excuse me.” She didn’t bother to wait for an answer, and instead excused herself, sitting down and logging in without any trouble, ignoring the attention she knew she was getting in favor of sorting out the messages sent to her since she’d last checked her accounts almost an entire day ago. Eighteen-some-odd hours, being generous with rounding out at the quarters.

Apparently, locking the house’s comm down “for the duration” meant for the next three days, but no longer than that. So for the duration, whatever contact Innogen wanted to make had to be done at the library under the ever-watchful eyes of the vengeful guardians of the metadata and stacks.

If she got her card approved, it might endear her to them enough that they’d only glare about Julian rather than openly talk to her about him.

In the meantime, it turned out she was missed at the office, though no one seemed worried enough to send anything to her personal account. She quickly composed, then took time to edit, a message to her direct supervisor, the director of personnel resources, and the senior board member she knew best explaining that there had been some family trouble, nothing serious enough to warrant a funeral, just something which required her attention and presence for a few more days, no more than a week, two at most, she’d be sure to let them know as soon as she was able.

She could say more to some of her cousins, could tell them her brother had gotten into some trouble and that it’d be seen to in court in no more than three days’ time. There wouldn’t be word on the outcome for some time after that, but she’d let them know as soon as she did.

Julian’s grandparents, his mother’s parents, were coming to England on Sunday; they’d been informed of the arrest at roughly the same time Innogen had been, but had to wait for Shabbat to end to travel. Innogen copied out directions to the local ferryport into her padd, checking both the provided maps and street-view images. She sent them a note as well, letting them know there was only so much she could say from where she was, being sure to tell them the house comm was locked down so they’d have to wait to talk until they were face-to-face.

Beyond that, and the usual message accumulation, that was all she had for the moment, and rather than ride out the remainder of her session waiting for more to arrive, she logged off with fifteen minutes left to go. There didn’t seem much point in doing otherwise.

She stood a moment by the sign-up sheet, looked towards the children’s section. Clenching and unclenching her hands, she glanced at the clock, and rather than walking right over, she took a short detour to stop at the windows, where she ran first her fingertips and then her whole hand over them. The texture of the glass was softer than she’d thought; no nubs or ripples anywhere. It felt just as gentle on the back of her hand, and if she’d been Julian’s age, she might well have pressed her cheek against it.

Since she wasn’t, she went to find him to take him back to the house instead – a task made more difficult by Julian not being exactly where she’d left him. She couldn’t well call out to him, not in a library, not even in the children’s section, so she began looking up and down all the stacks of picture books, peering into the small privacy booths, canvassing the non-fiction section and finally spotting him at a small children-sized table, ferociously reading a book large enough that he needed both his hands for turning the pages. Pages with a high word-picture ratio, even if the pictures themselves were gargantuan. And gorgeous, as well – beautiful photographs of wild places, of forests and meadows, oaks that stood for centuries and close-ups of fine blades of grass. She dropped to her knees to join him.

“Hello, Julian.”

“Hello, Aunt Innogen. Are you well?”

“Yes, I think so. I’ve just finished up my – I’ve finished making the messages I wanted to send, so we can go now. All right? Are you ready to go?”

He lifted up the remaining unread pages between his fingers, measuring the rest of the book by weight. “Soon.”

“All right. You’ll be ready to go soon. I’ll just…may I see this?”

“No.” He turned away as she reached out, using both his hands to pull the book with him.

“I see. Then I’ll be right back, then.” She grabbed the first large book she could find she thought she might like, something about birds that wasn’t what she’d hoped for but the best she could do without knowing exactly where Julian had found his own book. Grabbing a cushion over from one of the sitting pits, she arranged herself across the table from Julian, watching him more than reading the book, ready for the instant he decided he was done.

Several times she thought about asking him how he liked the book, but stopped herself just before she could open her mouth, not wanting to slow him down. She waited until they were two streets from the house to ask him instead.

“I liked the deer.”

“What about the deer did you like?”

“Roe and Red deer are native to England, the only deer that are, with the rest coming from Europe and Asia. Of these, Red deer are the largest native land mammal in England, though Ireland had larger Elk that are now long extinct. Imported deer include Water, Mountjar…”

Innogen had read enough over his shoulder that she knew it was _Muntjak_ , and remembered enough about what her brother had said about Julian to not interrupt and correct him while he was talking – that it was so hard to get him to talk, that when he did, he should be able to decide when and how he was finished. _Muntjak_ had enough letters in common with _Mountjar_ she didn’t see any point in raising a fuss over a mistake she might well have made herself. All that, and there was something she found quite fantastic about a six-year-old just a few weeks away from turning seven quoting large passages from books several years above his grade level, and doing so almost word-for-word.

He’d finished up when they got back to the house, and opened the door and stood aside to let Innogen go ahead of him, still without looking towards her face, just a glance in her general direction. Rather than get into a politeness bout with her nephew, Innogen simply said, “Thank you,” and walked inside.

“You’re welcome, Aunt Innogen,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

“It’s very gracious of –” but by then he was already leaving, up the stairs to his room, retreat and hide, to stay there and keep his words to himself for the rest of the day. Innogen wanted to take him out somewhere else, but for lack of any idea about nearby parks or museums his parents might have taken him to, she had to settle on coaxing him into the backyard, where he might at least be outside for a while. There wasn’t much else for her and Julian to do but hurry up and wait for his grandparents to arrive, and it was surprising how tiring that could get – that by the time night fell, Innogen couldn’t wait to sleep, but couldn’t manage to fall asleep, either. She didn’t have an adrenaline crash to fall back on, and it’d take at least thirty minutes for the sleep aid she’d gotten from the house replicator in the pantry to kick in.

It would be easy to walk back upstairs to the guest bedroom, lie under the covers and stare up at the ceiling until she drifted off. She put on an Ophelia album she hadn’t expected to find – shockingly recent, just two months old; she didn’t think his parents had time to keep up with modern music, what with raising a child and all – and sat down in the platform gliding chair tucked away in its own corner of the living room instead. When Innogen had come to the house to see Julian for the first time, just two days before his brit milah, she’d asked about the chair’s particular make and design. Julian’s mother had told her she couldn’t stomach the thought of nursing on a standard model rocking chair, that the ones she’d tried out had all made her feel slightly ill, and had settled on this design, on runners instead of curved feet to produce a more even and gentle back-and-forth motion for both her and her son. She’d had to wait to sign up for the queue to get one from a local craftsman, and only received it two weeks before Julian was born.

Then she’d demonstrated how well it worked, hushing Julian up after just a couple moments’ back-and-forth, without any trouble or fuss.

As the chair glided back and forth and Ophelia sang on, Innogen realized she might do well to get such a chair for herself. There wasn’t room in her study for anyone to sleep comfortably, but there was a little space she could clear in the corner for the chair. Just a few minutes of it and while she wasn’t escaping her problems, she felt much better about what she had left to deal with.

She pulled her feet up and tucked them beneath her legs, snuggling deeper into the cushions. Under the music, she heard a door open and close, and footsteps come down the stairs. She didn’t look up until they stopped, not quite having entered the room.

Julian was standing on the stairs, just listening. Except Innogen could see he wasn’t _just_ listening – he was listening with his full body, stretched tight to take in every sound. Like there was nothing else in the world. He was listening with a look of pure joy that Innogen knew she hadn’t been able to listen to music with since she’d been about six years old herself. She smiled and wiped a hand over her face and kept smiling without knowing why, and Julian kept on listening to the music. It didn’t seem quite right to break the magic. But it was past her own bedtime, never mind Julian’s.

“Hold the music,” she said, and it took Julian a moment to come back into himself, at first confused and sad, then simply tired. “Did I wake you up?” He didn’t give an answer, but she hadn’t expected one anyway. “Come on.” Innogen pushed herself out of the chair. “Let’s go to bed. Both of us.”

That seemed to satisfy him, and Innogen watched him climb into bed before closing the door behind her.

It wasn’t until she was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, that she realized she’d never sent an apology to Miranda.


	3. Too Little Too Late

When Mum and Dad had passed, the responsibility for managing their estate had fallen onto Innogen. Her brother hadn’t been much help to her – he hadn’t offered any aid and she knew not to bother asking, and the bulk of the work had helped her eat the worst of her grief. Work would have been welcome at a time like this, but she had some time off left to her before she even had to think about being back in London. And she had to wait for Julian’s grandparents to arrive.

At the ferryport, Innogen realized it was only her third time seeing them since her brother’s wedding, and that she didn’t think Julian would be so happy to see another person. If happy could work to describe him. They’d been sitting on one of the benches in the designated area, with Julian hiding from the world by falling into one of the games he’d found on her padd. It involved the player tossing balls at objects that flew past to make them shatter in order to keep on playing, with everything moving faster the deeper into the game the player went.

The announcement she’d been waiting for –“ _Ferry KS-109 from Khartoum is now arriving, ferry KS-109 from Khartoum is now arriving_ ” – pulled Innogen out of her reverie, almost made her jump out of her seat. If Julian had heard it, he didn’t seem to care, keeping on with evading electric wires and falling hammers.

“Julian, that’s their shuttle. We’ve got to go see them. You need to put the game away now.” He nodded. “Now, Julian. Before they get here. Please give it to me.” He didn’t respond, and she clenched her jaw before she took a hold of the padd, one thumb over the screen. “Julian –”

“No!” He tried to jerk away from her, but she held firm.

“ _Now_ , Julian. You need to give this back to me.” He made a whining noise and doubled his grip on the padd, but one hard, quick pull of her hands and it was back in hers. A series of low notes came out of the speakers, the sounds the game made when a player lost all progress and had to start over. She glanced at his tally, and he’d gotten farther than she ever had by a rather impressive amount. “All right, now that –” Innogen turned to him, realizing the look of shock on his face was growing more and more fraught. “Julian, we’re going to collect your grandparents and you will _not_ start crying here. If you start crying here then – then there’s going to be _something_ , something _big_ I promise you, but you won’t want it, so not now, Julian _please_ not now, _don’t start crying_ , I need you to _not cry here._ ”

People were watching and Innogen couldn’t care as Julian did everything to cry but make tears. His entire body shook, he clenched his hands tight to his chest, hyperventilating, making breaths as large as he could and his eyes wide open, and so much fear in them as he pulled away from Innogen, curling up to make himself small. But not crying.

“I – Julian, you can play that game again later. It’s not going away forever, it’s just going away for right now.” She glanced around, searching in vain, looked back to Julian. “Right now, we need to find your grandparents. Their ferry just came in, so we need to get them, we – oh.” Innogen stood and waved, and Nasir and Amira waved back. “Here they come, Julian.” He unclenched his fists, sat up a little in the chair, followed her finger to see where she was pointing. And then, just like that, like hitting the lights, his face lit up. He hadn’t stopped shaking, but all the energy he’d spent not crying turned into making him excited to see his grandparents. “Do you want to go over and say hello?”

He shook his head and hid his gaze from them, choosing to stare at Innogen’s boots without looking up even as the three adults exchanged greetings, even when Amira crouched down and said, “Hello, Julian. It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too. And how was your trip?”

Amira shook her head at Julian’s near-recitation of the question, even as he kept his gaze on Innogen’s boots. “It went fine. We’re just glad to finally be here.”

“And now that we’ve arrived, we really should be going,” Nasir said.

The train ride back to the house was quick enough, most of it spent commiserating on how ferries never had replicators installed and how it was always a problem to have to remember to bring food when traveling.

“You’ve been to the house?” Innogen asked. “I haven’t been using anything but the replicator. I’m not sure if what’s in the fridge is still good or not, I haven’t tried any of it yet.”

“We’ve been, some time ago,” Nasir said.

“I was just thinking, I remember that the two of you keep kosher, and with just the one of everything, I don’t know how –”

“It’s really quite all right,” Amira held up a hand. “Plausible deniability is all we’re asking for.”

“I think I might be able to give you that.”

Lunch was served after Nasir had the replicator sterilize itself seven times in quick succession, and rather than serve everyone their own individual meal, set out empty plates around the table and larger serving bowls that allowed them to each take as much as they liked. Innogen hadn’t seen that sort of set-up in London anywhere besides large parties and social gatherings where it was easier to set out a buffet than serve everyone individually, which she remarked upon as she took some of the grated carrot salad.

“It’s what we usually do at home,” Amira said. “And – and Amsha said it helps Julian.”

“Oh.”

Julian hadn’t seemed to notice the mention of his parents, and simply continued to eat his lunch. If he was asked a direct question, he’d look to their faces for the time it took to provide an answer, no more and no less. When he was done, well before Innogen had answered all of Nasir’s gently prodding questions about how she was feeling and how her job was going, he excused himself, recycled his plate, and went upstairs to his room. Neither of his grandparents seemed bothered by his behavior, and they didn’t seem bothered by Innogen’s questions about Julian once he was out of earshot. 

It turned out his parents had been drilling him on making eye contact when he answered questions.

“She was more willing to talk about him than his father was,” Amira explained. “So we’d make sure to call her specifically. It felt a bit like spying on him, but he’s our grandson. We deserved to know.”

“I know I should have asked more, but it didn’t seem right. They never wanted to talk about him, and they only came to see me twice, when he was one and when he was five. I always thought, I have my work, I have my career, I’ll make time later –”

“I understand,” Nasir said. “Even when we made sure we were only calling our daughter, she didn’t want to say much to us, either. If there was good news, certainly. But I don’t think either of his parents thought there was much good news to share.”

“You still got news, though. Right?”

“Grandparents hold more clout than aunts,” he chuckled. “How is my beautiful grandson, growing so fast these days, going to school now I hear, tell me about him, really tell me about him.”

“Oh, God,” Innogen laughed, “If my parents ever talked to me in that tone –”

“It’s a gift,” Amira said. “You learn it as soon as you have a grandchild.”

“I’m just glad I never had that tone directed at me.” Innogen gathered the mugs into the replicator for recycling. “You know that’s why I was so happy when Julian was born? Part of it, at any rate. I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about ever hearing why I hadn’t had children, or when I’d settle down with a nice woman. All the burdens were off me.”

“I wouldn’t say I knew that specifically.” Without a mug to fiddle with, Amira’s hands were fidgeting on the table, wrapping around and over each other. Nasir glanced at her, and she smiled faintly at him, and he nodded back. Turning to Innogen, she took a breath to speak.

“I’m sorry,” Innogen cut her off, “I’m sorry, but this is – can we make it clear we’re here for Julian? Please? I just don’t want this – this _this_ to get too far gone before it’s too much to deal with, let’s just get it out right now if there’s anything left to get out. If there is, now’d be the time.”

“There isn’t,” Nasir said.

“Well, yes, _now_ there isn’t, wonderful, well done me. I’m sorry. I’m glad you’re here. Thank you. I’m grateful you’ve come, and I’m grateful for what you’ll be doing to help me. Shit. What I want to say –” She looked at her sister-in-law’s parents watching her, waiting for something more to come out of her mouth, and she didn’t know what it was they were hoping for. “What I want to ask. They talked more to you. And they didn’t talk much to me. I could’ve asked, but I didn’t. So I have to ask you. About Julian. About how to take care of him.”

They glanced between each other again, Nasir tilting his head, Amira nodding back ever so slightly. He looked to Innogen. “They didn’t want to talk about him with us. We’d ask, and we’d get good news from our daughter. Always. She’d share bad news, too, if we asked her enough. But we had to make sure to ask. She’d stopped telling us without us asking. Everything. Things like when he began talking again –”

“Began talking again?” Innogen asked. “You’re not being serious. He’s talking now, he talked the last time I saw him –”

“He _stopped_ ,” Amira said. “They told us he’d stopped because that was before they’d stopped giving us news, and they told us he started again because that was good enough news they didn’t have to be asked to share. And in between, they didn’t talk about how he’d stopped talking, so we wouldn’t speak of it either. As far as they were concerned, he stopped and then he started again, and it wasn’t worth it to talk about the in-between of things. That was how we’d had to figure out things. By listening to what they weren’t telling us.” She fixed her stare on Innogen. “You grew up with his father. Now, you tell us, was it always like that with him?”

“Not always. He started not talking about things sometime, oh, sometime around high school – he’d always be rushing from one project to another, and never talked about them while they were happening. He’d tell us to wait and see, tell us what we were _going_ to see, but not that much more than that. I think he thought it’d keep us interested. Keep us waiting for more. Which I can understand if someone’s trying to find a new career, and I know some people at my agency who hate to talk about their projects until they’re complete, but when it’s your own child, it doesn’t seem like it should be treated the same way as that.”

“What I did ask once was why.” Amira shook her head. “Why we weren’t getting any news. We’d actually come up for a little holiday, to surprise them, and it wasn’t –” Nasir put his hand over hers, and she smiled at his touch. “Surprising them did help with it. And when I was alone with my daughter, I asked her why she and her husband weren’t giving me any news on Julian. She explained…what she said was that when there was something to share, she’d share it, but when there wasn’t, she didn’t want to say the same things to us over and over. I don’t know what had happened to make her think that. As though we wouldn’t welcome the same pieces of news over and over again, as long as they were all about Julian.”

“His mother never said that to me. I don’t know. I know I didn’t ask why, but I think I can see where she was coming from. Not – hang on. I mean to say, I don’t think it was right of her to not say anything when you wanted to hear something. I think that if she didn’t think there was anything worth sharing, she would have thought it’d be easier to keep quiet about everything. If she didn’t think anything had changed. But even –”

Except that in the last few months, Julian’s parents _had_ talked to Innogen about him. Her brother had told her how good Julian was doing, how he was speaking so well, how things were doing for him and how they’d keep on getting better, how everything was coming along so well compared to how he’d been doing, _leaps and bounds, I swear, you’ll never believe it_ – and because it was her brother giving the news, Innogen knew he’d been holding back. He’d smiled and laughed and told her to wait the way he always did, no matter how well or how poorly something was coming along all she had to do was wait and see. And she’d never thought to press him for more, not when all he would tell her would be _wait and see, just you wait and see._

Their trial was two days away. She might not be left waiting long.

“I think that’s enough,” Nasir said. “We understand what you’re trying to tell us.”

“All right. Now, for while you’re here, I’ll take the couch.”

“Why would you get the couch?”

“Because now that you’re here, I can’t sleep in the guest bedroom.”

“Nonsense. No one ought to sleep on a couch while there’s a bed available.”

“No. No, you can’t mean that, that’d mean –”

“We’ve visited before,” Amira said, very gently. “We’ve always taken the guest room. I think Julian would rather see us there.”

“Right,” Innogen nodded. “So I’ll take the couch.”

“I think we’re missing something.”

“Well, I certainly can’t take the master bedroom –”

“Why not?” Nasir asked.

“Because…well, because it wouldn’t be _proper_.” She pushed every gram of her accent into the word, hoping that it’d carry the necessary weight.

“I think we’re slightly beyond that,” Amira said; Innogen’s stomach flipped when she realized it hadn’t. “Wouldn’t it be more proper for you to take the master bedroom?”

“I’m afraid I’m missing something now.”

Nasir smiled. It didn’t feel as gentle as it looked. “As I said, Innogen, no one ought to sleep on a couch while there’s a bed available. It’d be easier on you, at least, to get decent rest on a bed.”

“If you put it like that, I suppose it might well be.” _Not so, not so._


	4. Told You So

The doorbell summoned Julian as well as Innogen. He was there first, opening the door to a comm technician and three law representatives, the sight of which made him scream bloody murder and run upstairs.

“Fucking all hell if he’d – sorry. Just come in,” she slammed the door behind them. “There’s some – his grandparents are in the kitchen – you wait here, I’ll be right back down.”

Innogen had to get down onto her belly to find Julian hiding under his bed, face-down on the floor, clutching his bear tight. As much as she wished he wasn’t there, the sight of him reminded her of being so small she could fit under her own bed, something she hadn’t had reason to remember for ages. She did her best to force the memories away from her mind again, and found Julian was too far under the bed for her hands to reach, her hand coming away covered in dust.

“Julian?” He whimpered, crying. “Julian, they’re just here to fix the comm and talk to me and your grandparents for a while. They’re not here for you. You don’t have to worry about talking to them.” She watched him pull his legs in closer to his body, making himself take up that much less space. “Can you at least tell me why you’re hiding? Are you scared of them? They’re not here for you.”

He turned his head so he was at least facing in her general direction, taking in big gulps of air to finally settle himself enough to ask, “Did they bring Mum with them?”

“Did they – no, Julian, your mother’s not with them.”

She watched him digest the information, blink, and then deliberately look at her as he asked, “Will they bring Mum and Dad with them?”

“Will they? I don’t know. I need to talk to them today about your parents. Do you want to come talk to them with me?”

“No thank you.”

“Then I…fine. We’re going to be downstairs, if you need us.”

“Yes, Aunt Innogen.”

Amira was waiting just outside the door, and Innogen rested against it for a moment before telling her where Julian was hiding and that he seemed to be all right for the moment. “He’s not going anywhere, so we might as well go talk to them now.”

“I suppose so, then.”

After replicating some tea, the tech went off to unlock the comm, while everyone else sat around the kitchen table and stared as the representatives – Aster and Dillard she hadn’t yet met, but Stevenson she had – reenacted an old movie scene and took out their briefcases, unlocked them, and began putting papers out on the table.

“What’s this all for?” Nasir demanded.

“Paper is, still, impossible to hack. For the information we’re dealing with, we need it to remain confidential. And highly monitored. We can’t guarantee that same privacy with electronic messages,” Dillard explained.

“That’s fair,” Innogen said. “A lot of the design work we do at the agency is on paper. It always gets us a better feel for what we’re doing. I suppose it helps us keep track of everything, too.”

“So long as the methods work,” Stevenson said, with his same insincere smile. Innogen returned it as best she could. He didn’t notice, returning to his briefcase and taking out another stack of documents, handing them to Aster, who began dividing them into smaller piles.

“Most of what we have here, you can’t keep. This is primarily an information session, to –”

“Let me see that.” Amira grabbed the top sheet. “I’ll give it back when I’m done, thank you.”

“An information session to tell us what?” Nasir asked.

“Sensitive data, which has to be kept confidential.” Aster took out another sheet of paper. “The Bashirs’ charges, that sort of thing. Their trial’s tomorrow, so…well.”

Nasir snorted. “So _now_ I’m allowed to learn their charges? Fantastic, and now, if you’d be so kind –”

“They didn’t kill anyone, did they?” Innogen asked.

“No,” Stevenson almost laughed, “trust me, if it was something like murder we’d have already told you.”

“Treason?” Amira shouted, slamming the paper down. “My daughter’s guilty of _treason?_ ”

“She’s not yet been tried, ma’am. Her _or_ her husband. Not yet tried, much less convicted.” Dillard handed them a stack that had been stapled – _stapled!_ – together, just one for the three of them to share. Amira took it after a brief scuffle, leaving Innogen and Nasir to wait for her to finish. Dillard simply cleared his throat and said, “While you’re not cleared to retain ownership of that particular document, there are others you can request for your personal files, if you’d like them.”

“I think I might, thank you,” Innogen said.

“Now,” Aster looked around the table, “there’s a matter of personal correspondence.”

“Is the comm fixed already?”

“I doubt it. But we’re not talking about that. Part of the – well. There are only so many communication venues allowed, for people in their particular circumstance. While they will be allowed monitored comm access during their trial, it’s not strictly meant for personal…well. Here you are.” 

Two more envelopes were removed, and handed over to Innogen. They were sealed, addressed to her and to Julian, and opening them up revealed something Innogen hadn’t expected. It wasn’t just another piece of paper: it was her brother’s handwriting. She stared, not quite sure what she was looking at really meant.

“That’s a little more old-fashioned than I’d think of this,” Amira said.

“We’ve yet to find something that’s more –”

“What the bloody hell is this?” Innogen shouted, waving the paper.

“What the bloody hell is what?”

“This,” she hissed, slamming the censored paper down. The omitted sentences hadn’t just been crossed out, or erased, or marked over: someone had gone through and _cut them out_ , physically removing their presence from the document. Only the empty space gave any indication of what might have once been said. “This – what do you expect me to _make_ of this censoring, like there’s anything I shouldn’t read or hear in –”

“There might well be, Miss Bashir, which is why this is how it is,” Dillard said. “Even with paper correspondence being so comparatively secure – even with it being the _most_ secure alternative, we still need to work to prevent any information from falling into the wrong hands when it comes to charges of treason.”

“Right, because –” Innogen skimmed the passages before and after the empty space, “– because telling me what he’s _eating_ is so confidential that you have to cut out half that paragraph.”

All three agents looked at her. Stevenson didn’t smile his insincere smile again when he said, “All I can say, Miss Bashir, is that the part we removed didn’t speak about the food.”

“And you can’t tell me what it does or doesn’t say.”

“Correct.”

“I’m sorry if I’m not satisfied with that.”

“It’s not my job to see you satisfied. I’m trying to help prepare you for the eventuality that –”

“Do you have my Mum and Dad?”

Julian stood at the doorway, had been standing there for who knew how long, his bear gone and his eyes clear, his voice shaking with all the force he could manage to suffuse into it – rather a lot for a six-year-old, to Innogen’s ears.

“Do we what?” Aster asked.

“Do you have my Mum and Dad?”

“What’s he talking about?” Dillard whispered to Innogen.

“He thinks you took his parents away and you have them somewhere,” she whispered back. “Stevenson was there when they were arrested, he probably recognized him.”

“Ah.” Dillard nodded. “Um…”

“Julian,” Nasir said.

“Right,” Stevenson said. He got up from his chair, and crouched down to reach Julian’s eye level, if he would look him in the eye. “Julian, my name’s Lionel. Lionel Stevenson. We’re not here to hurt you, or take you away. We don’t have your parents with us, but they’re – where they are, they’re safe, so you don’t have to worry about them getting into more trouble or any danger, just stay calm and we’ll all be fine here.”

“Where are my parents?”

“I told you, someplace safe. Now, if you’ll let us –”

“When are you bringing my Mum and Dad back?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Can I go see them?”

Stevenson looked at Julian for a moment, then turned to the table. “Could one of you deal with him?”

“Fuck you,” Innogen whispered, and before his grandparents could stand, got up to crouch down next to Julian. He wasn’t looking at her, but when she said his name, he turned in her direction, orienting himself towards her voice. “I know you’re worried about your Mum and Dad,” Innogen said, quiet enough for just the two of them. “We’re talking about them right now. We’re going to find out what we can do, me and your grandmother and your grandfather, and when we know we’ll tell you. Is that all right?”

“All right, Aunt Innogen.”

“Thank you, Julian. Could you – could you go back to your room? We need to talk with privacy.”

He jerked his chin up, then walked around the table, away from the stairs out to the backyard. Innogen stood, blinked, asked everyone for a moment and followed him outside where he’d made his way over to a far corner behind some bushes, entertaining himself by arranging stones and leaves and didn’t seem to hold any sorrow over the disappearance of his parents or concern for his future. She glanced back at the house, to Julian, back to the house where she would have to bring him, drag him in if she had to, and sank down to join him in the dirt.

“Julian, you should come inside.” He rubbed a pebble between his palms to clean it. “It’d be better for everyone if you came inside. Not just for me. For your parents, too. We need you inside. Can you come, please? Will you?”

“I will.”

“Now? Or soon?”

“Soon.”

Stevenson cleared his throat and Innogen looked up at him while Julian kept on with his project. “Miss Bashir, if it isn’t –”

“We’ll be coming inside soon. Won’t we, Julian?”

“We’ll be coming inside soon,” he echoed.

“Exactly that. Go back in, have some tea. When we get inside, which won’t be long, will it Julian, we can finish then.”

It wasn’t even twenty minutes before they were back at the table, by which time the comm technician had finished her work and was already gone. After a few minutes, Nasir took Julian by the hand to return to the backyard, and Amira and Innogen listened to the details of the upcoming trial. How the charges had come from someone else who’d gone beyond the pale to _name names_ and theirs had been among them. That the charges for _conspiracy to commit treason_ were tied up within a larger network that they’d planned on engaging with to make that treason possible in the first place. How they’d wanted to do something Stevenson described as _practically unthinkable_ to Julian, modify and engineer him from the inside out as so many people had done to their children centuries ago, the stuff of horror stories. The stuff of history textbooks, war stories, all the horrors of the Eugenics Wars that Earth was still healing from. That, what with the evidence gathered against them, no matter what the verdict the trial itself would be over quite fast. For all that she wasn’t allowed to hear, for all that she and his grandparents agreed Julian attending the trial would be one of the worst ideas in recent memory, they knew that for Innogen to go would be one of the kinder things she could do. 

That night, Innogen sat alone in the master bedroom, trying not to wonder what might happen in the days to come.

Thirteen days later, she didn’t have to wonder anymore.


	5. The Old Apartment

“Do you have a set?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then you should take them.” Amira smiled and stroked the Shabbat candlesticks. They’d been one of her gifts to her daughter on her wedding day, a lovely hand-sculpted set that still bore little bits of wax and tarnish – well-used, well-loved.

“Amira, I wouldn’t –”

“You can’t until you have some for you to. Here. I don’t like the thought of them sitting in a box somewhere. You can at least have them out to look at.”

“Well, so could you. I don’t even know what prayers to say,” Innogen pressed. “I mean, I could learn, but I – they’d find more use if you’re the one who takes them home.”

“Most likely. I just can’t help but think, maybe Julian…no. No, right now, you’re right.” She set them aside. “I’ll need them here if I’m staying through the weekend, besides.”

“What can’t you think?”

“Hm? Oh, nothing at all, nothing at all.”

Innogen shrugged. “If you say so.”

“It’ll be nice to have another set for guests.”

“I’m sure it will be. One of the woman’s three mitzvoth. I don’t remember the other two, but at least I know that one.” Amira laughed, and Innogen felt the words tumble out of her mouth without being able to stop them, “What I was thinking was that – I don’t know if I should, it’s not just sending these home with me, it’s that there’s so much more than just candlesticks here, not the glider chair, I’m _keeping_ the glider. It’s more than the things here, it’s who’s still living here. It’s that, shouldn’t it be you that Julian goes home with? I don’t think, I can’t wonder if it’s quite, if it’d be quite _appropriate_ for him and I to –” 

“I can’t think of anyone more appropriate.” Amira looked down at her hands, rubbing the tips of her fingers together. “Isn’t losing his home and parents enough loss for him? Uprooting him to someplace he doesn’t even speak the language would be too much for Julian. Far, far better for him to stay in his home country, far better for everyone.”

“Better for everyone,” Innogen echoed.

“Precisely.”

“Better for him.”

“I’d think so.”

“Yes, I can…I can see you might. Just…it’s that it’ll take more than just _moving_ these things home with me, then. He can have the guest bedroom as his own, it won’t take much to change it – it’ll need some rearranging, some furniture of his own. It might need his own bed, I’m not sure. We should find out what we need to make it all work. Shouldn’t we?”

“You’ve made the calls?”

“A few. The local and London depots. The moving crew. There’s going to be a bed for Julian when he gets to London, absolutely, I’m just not certain which bed it’s going to be.”

“I’m afraid that wasn’t quite what I meant.”

“Then I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what you’d wanted to say as best you can.”

When Amira didn’t answer right away, Innogen glanced towards her – then focused to look at her, at the way she kept her hands in her lap, the way she wasn’t looking back at Innogen.

“It’s not only you and us, is it? In the whole of the family.”

“Well, I’ve got some cousins in the area and up in Yorkshire, if that’s –”

“Then why is it you haven’t yet asked them to help?”

Innogen stared, blinked, weighed the question. “Help with what?”

That got Amira to look her in the face, with something gentle in her eyes.

A few hours later, having made all the possible calls she could and leaving messages for roughly half of the people she’d hoped to speak with, Innogen thought Amira might finally understand the depth of what she’d meant when she’d told her that being an outreaching person had always been difficult for her. Not that it mattered a great deal, now that she had a handful more of offers to help. Most of them hadn’t received the news and had been shocked to hear it even without the scant details Innogen was legally allowed to disclose, some of them capable and willing to lend a hand in Guildford and a few in London. Provided she gave them a day or two to arrange matters on their end, a request Innogen couldn’t find fault with.

The bulk of the following day was spent on the comm – including composing another set of notes to work, apologizing early and often that it’d take at least another two weeks to manage all the family affairs – and two days later, she found herself back in London for the afternoon. Not for any longer than that, not even for long enough to linger on in her bedroom. Just long enough to open the door and find out her house didn’t smell _right_ , that a few days away was enough to shift its scent enough that she had to stop and brace herself before going through the door, even with everyone waiting behind her; a smell that was still and stale, even after so little time away. Long enough to meet with the depot’s staff, to help them set up for the big move that was still incoming, to see to it that everything could go as smoothly as was possible to do so. If she’d had more time, she could have put in the requisition for transporter credits and timeslot and ship everything over in two minutes. But all she had was the ability to put in an expedient order with the local resource depots and moving crews. Not enough, not at all, not much better than nothing.

But even so, _not much better than nothing_ was still _something._

Talking to everyone who came to help, family and professionals alike, felt like talking to ghosts. The unreality of the situation was starting to set in as the normal feeling of reality, the bewilderment and uncertainty of what would be coming the next day, and the day after that, and beyond – vague terms of agreement over a return to London, a return to work, to routine, was all made strange with the lingering thoughts of a now-looming presence. Julian was her charge, her responsibility, a part of her life now that she hadn’t thought he ever would occupy. A part of her life she thought no person alive, Human or otherwise, would ever occupy. She didn’t feel brave or strong for it, no matter how her cousins spoke to her about it, no matter how much praise they showered on her; she couldn’t feel sad about it, not quite, not when she didn’t yet know what it was she was feeling sad for, if it was for Julian or for herself or the both of them.

Attempts to communicate the significance of what was bearing down on the both of them proved difficult. The night before everyone was set to congregate at the house, Innogen sat Julian down with his grandparents by her side for help, and explained that since his parents weren’t with him, he was coming to London to live with her. She tried to use words she thought he might understand; even though he could read and learn from books for people twice his age he couldn’t tolerate a deviation in his morning routine.

Julian listened to them, looking between all the adults in the room. He simply listened to Innogen and his grandparents’ explanations that since his parents were gone, he would be moving to London to be with her, and then he went back to his room. Innogen hadn’t heard any crying, but then, she hadn’t made herself go listen, either.

The day before the grand move, she thanked everyone well in advance; the day of the grand move, she led Julian out one door and through another.


	6. Hello City

Falling asleep with guests in the house was something Innogen had practiced often enough the situation didn’t feel strange – she didn’t worry needlessly about what sounds she might make when she got up to use the toilet, or over anyone waking as she lingered on in the hallway outside the room where they slept. Adjusting to thinking of someone in the house with her as someone that she wouldn’t classify as a _guest_ would take more time.

Maybe it was trying to think of Julian in such a way as to have him a permanent figure, a _fixture_ , was what was keeping her awake. She couldn’t even soothe herself to drowsiness, not even with how bodily weary she was from the struggles of the day. Being home again was all well and good, and she’d felt more relieved and excited to return to London than she’d been in a long time, but even home again in her own bed, she wasn’t getting any closer to sleep.

For lack of anything better to do, she went up to the second floor to check on Julian. She didn’t knock on the door, just gently pushed it open, and waited a moment to let her eyes adjust to the streetlamp light coming through the window. When they did, and she didn’t see Julian in his bed – the bed they’d brought in from Guildford, the bed she and his grandparents had seen him get into earlier that evening – she did her best to not panic. He wasn’t anywhere in the room that she could see, and didn’t respond to her speaking his name. And his bear was gone as well. Turning the light on didn’t elicit any sounds or reactions, and he wasn’t even hiding under the bed.

The floor’s bathroom was empty, as was her study right across the hallway; he wasn’t leafing through her paper books, or through her papers, or making use of her work supplies. He hadn’t snuck into her bathroom while she was up, or into her bedroom or underneath her bed. Downstairs in the living room, on the air mattress they’d had to replicate that very afternoon from a public domain model which hadn’t been particularly easy to set up, his grandparents slept on soundly and peacefully. Julian hadn’t snuck into bed with them for the supposed comfort of warm bodies close by.

Beyond them, the front door was shut, but that didn’t necessarily mean something. She had a full moment of thinking she ought to call the police, or maybe run out into the street and call out his name like some sort of awful drama about twenty-first century orphans – and then she felt cool air blowing into the room. When she turned around and saw the back door was open, she hoped, very dearly, and she was rewarded: Julian was standing outside in the middle of her backyard, barefoot and clutching his bear tight to his chest with his face buried in its fur.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, and stepped outside to join him. “Oh, you’ve got to be bloody well kidding me – for God’s sake, Julian, _get back inside!_ ” Her feet hit the cold ground, the shock running up her body and down again. “What could you possibly be _doing_ out here, why did you –”

Julian didn’t give any sign he’d heard her, but when she placed a hand on his shoulder, he flinched and _wailed_ , a high-pitched cry that stopped when she jerked her hand away. He began to shake, and Innogen knew she ought to have said something soothing and gentle to help him want to come back, the sort of thing she’d heard his parents say to him all the time to keep him from making a show of things in public. The sort of thing she’d said to calm him down when he was hiding underneath his bed. 

It was a fairly pleasant night, really.

She ran her hands over her hair, tucking strands behind her ears as she crouched down to reach his eye level. He still wasn’t looking towards her. “Julian. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. I’d like you to talk to me, please talk to me. Could you tell me why you’re out here?” He kept his face pressed into his bear. “Why aren’t you in bed?” His shaking had become more of a steady rocking. “Julian, I need you to talk to me. You need to tell me why you aren’t in your room right now.”

Innogen watched him shake his head and make little, thin noises from out of the back of his throat before he calmed and quieted, and then whispered, “It’s not dark enough.”

“It isn’t – what isn’t dark enough?”

“It’s not dark enough,” he said again, more forcefully, almost angry.

“Julian, you need to tell me what isn’t dark enough. Otherwise I can’t do anything to help. I need you to tell me more.” He squeezed his eyes shut and clutched his bear. Innogen didn’t know children well, barely knew Julian, but she could tell he was just as tired on his feet as she was. “Please tell me what’s not dark enough.”

He jerked his head up and down. “The window.”

“The window isn’t dark enough? What – why wouldn’t – oh. I see. Your room’s facing the street.” Of course it was. He was coming from Guildford and wasn’t used to London lights, even in Westminster. She remembered the heavy curtains she’d packed from Julian’s room, his mother’s old story about installing them, and how the last time he’d been over, she and his parents had put up extra curtains over the windows in the guest room then too. “It’s not dark enough in your room, and you can’t sleep.”

He nodded.

“All right. You come back inside. Tomorrow we’ll put your curtains up, and then it’ll be nice and dark for you, but we can’t do that tonight. I’m sorry we can’t do it tonight, but we’ll do it tomorrow, so now, please, just come inside.”

Julian nodded again. She reached out and put an arm around him, moving gently and slowly; he still flinched and pulled away with another quiet shout. Innogen jerked her hand away. “Dammit – oh, piss – oh – sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. Forget I said that. But it doesn’t matter what I said because you still have to come inside. We’ll get it darker for you tomorrow so you can sleep tomorrow night. Tonight you – you should just stay in your room so nobody worries about you more. All right? Can you come inside with me?”

H nodded his head up and down, then looking deliberately away from her, moved to clutch his bear to his chest with one hand and then held up his other. She looked down at it, and after a moment he shook it at her, making a small, thin, urgent noise. Innogen blinked, then realized what he was trying to tell her as best he could. She reached out and took his hand. He squeezed her grown-up fingers as hard as he could with his own little ones, and walking at his pace, she led him inside, past his grandparents, upstairs, back into his bedroom.

“I’m sorry it isn’t as dark as it should be for you to sleep. But please, just try?”

“I can’t,” he whispered.

“Then could you – all right. You don’t have to try to sleep. But you need to stay in here until morning. You’re going to be fine. At least lie down in bed so you can get some rest. In fact, wait. I’ll get something else for you.” He was still sitting on top of the messy covers and clutching his bear when she came back with a set of winter flannel blankets still musty from the closet. “You can hide underneath these. See?” She didn’t allow herself to giggle over how silly she felt when she draped one over her head, or when she held it out next to her and shook it like it was a towel. “It’s full dark under this.” He took it when she handed it to him, inspecting it as well as he could in the London nighttime light, and then copied her actions, placing it over his head as well. “Do you like that?” she asked when he emerged.

“Thank you, Aunt Innogen.”

“You’re welcome, Julian. I’ll see you in the morning.”


	7. Bull In A China Shop

It was easy enough for Innogen to keep track of everything happening at the agency during her ongoing leave – asking colleagues and superiors how things were going was as much a desire to maintain even a reminder of her presence as it was her genuine wish to keep informed of whatever news she could receive. And no one was censoring themselves when they told her when an author wanted the agency to help design a set of book covers for a boxed set of their poetry collections. What hadn’t been easy was admitting there wasn’t any point in attempting off-site productivity, no matter how much she wanted to get something done and participate. It was absolutely a possibility, it was something she’d done twice before to keep viral infections safely quarantined in her own house, and it wasn’t an option when there was still so much to be done with Julian.

When all was done with him, when he was settled into London life, he’d be going to school. She could return to the office for at least a part of the working day. Innogen knew she could content herself to wait for that.

What she couldn’t content herself with was how difficult it was to parse out the full implications of everything. Nearly two years ago, Gertrude O’nan from the agency’s legal department had told her that she _owed her one_. So with Julian and his grandparents busy for the day and far away from the house, Innogen finally put that to the test, with the one owed her being O’nan – dedicated mother of four – giving her some help with deciphering and making sense of the papers and padds spread out in front of them, all of them dealing with Julian’s medical history.

“Five. Five different doctors. The one from his school wasn’t enough, they had to go about seeing four more.” O’Nan tossed a padd down.

“What could they have been looking for?” Innogen asked.

“Two others, maybe, I _might_ be able to see two others after the school’s evaluation,” she said without having heard her. “But if they’d wanted a third – by the time you’re asking for a third option you’re asking to be _wrong_ about something. Not _right._ And everyone was giving them the same answer, and they all recommended the exact same things. But there’s no follow up from any of them. And these aren’t new, either. The most recent one is from a year ago. This doesn’t seem – just what was going on with Julian’s parents?”

“What they’d wanted was – sorry.” She caught herself just in time. “Whatever they’d wanted, I don’t want to speculate on their reasons for all of this. He didn’t come up much in conversation, and they certainly never mentioned any of this.” Her eyes slid over words and phrases like _autism_ and _neurological development_ and _cognitive disabilities_ and _diagnostic criteria all met_ – words and phrases she’d rarely encountered, much less read them in what was evidently their proper context and correct usage. It was almost a parade.

“If they’d wanted to be wrong, I can see that. I can accept that. It’s that there wasn’t follow-up to any of them that’s getting to me. Every doctor said the same damn thing, over and over. By the fourth I’d think they’d have accepted the diagnosis and gone to – look. I have friends who’ve gotten bad news about their children, and I don’t just mean bad news they got into a fight, I mean bloody bad news like Julian’s gotten here. My friends went from one doctor to another and asked to be wrong, but when that never happened, by the third diagnosis they’d at least realized they weren’t going to ever hear anything different, and found some way to deal with it instead. They went for a follow-up beyond the initial diagnosis. But Julian’s parents didn’t do that. There’s no good reason for that to not have happened.”

“Are you saying there are bad reasons to keep asking to be wrong?”

“I hope I’m saying that.” She sighed and glanced at the ceiling. “How’s he been adjusting to everything?”

“Better. He’s sleeping more now that we got his curtains up. He’s not struggling over how to get a meal when there’s just the one replicator for the house. Should I get a fridge? Would that help him?”

“I’d wait a little longer before any remodeling like that.”

That night, Asima and Nasir were just as lost in all the reports as the two of them had been – Julian’s parents hadn’t said a thing to them about getting the same diagnoses one after another, either. Looking back on what they’d gotten, most of the news had been either noncommittal or positive, nothing negative if they could at all avoid it. It’d been more than what Innogen had gotten, by virtue of being grandparents – more photographs, more news, more reports of small victories and quiet triumphs, and it was all enough to make Innogen feel like she’d missed something in not asking after him more than she had. But when the three of them looked closer, with Julian sleeping upstairs as best he could, they saw most of the pictures had him looking away, and of the few with him smiling, none of those had him smiling towards the camera. He smiled when he was rolling around on the grass or when he was in the bath, but mostly, not at all.

Nasir queued up a short video on his padd from when Julian had just turned two. “I never thought I’d needed to,” he explained when Innogen asked why he hadn’t ever thought to put anything together. It was Julian out in a park in Guildford, one Innogen recognized from walking past it three weeks earlier. In the video, his mother was calling out to him, asking him to look at her, _give me a smile, please yes please,_ and Julian had made a low sound and shook his head and turned away.

O’Nan had only been able to spare a day to help untangle everything inadvertently bequeathed. It was still helpful, one of the better things Innogen could have ever asked the world to provide her under her current circumstances. Provide to her and Julian. The local London school systems were daunting enough as it was. She wouldn’t have guessed Julian had to go through a sixth evaluation, but evidently, that was what the future held for him. After she found out, the school’s administrative secretary waited for her to run out of steam to say once more, “I’m sorry, but that’s still our policy.”

“It’s a _bad policy_. The evaluations we already have – all of them, how many do you even need, we have his diagnosis, can’t you just –”

“Miss Bashir, please listen. I’ve seen everything, and I don’t like what we have to do either.” That caught her by surprise, and she leaned away from the screen as the secretary leaned towards hers. “Quite honestly, I think your son –”

“Pardon?”

“He is your son, yes?”

“No,” Innogen said sharply.

“Then – I’m sorry,” she grabbed a padd and glanced at it. “I’d just thought –”

“Nephew.” Anger with a focused point was better than anger without one. “He’s my nephew, and my brother’s son. Not mine. We’ve got the same last name, but he’s not my son. It’s all over the forms, if you’d have read them I’d think you’d know.”

“My apologies.”

“Thank you.”

“My point, though. He’s under your care, and you’re responsible for him, and that means if you want him to have access to the services we both know he needs, then he needs an additional evaluation done by someone within our set of approved physicians. And I’m sorry he has to go through that again. But even though we have everything you have sent us, and it’s all very good, trust me, if this isn’t done through our own channels, we can’t accept it. If you’d contacted us a little earlier, or had one of these professionals do so – well. No need to get into that now.”

“No, I suppose there isn’t.”

There wasn’t anything she could ask for. Not even for his grandparents to stay. They had their own lives to get back to, lives that didn’t belong to Julian and Innogen. He seemed all right with waving them away at the ferryport, possibly because they’d let him know it was coming days ahead of time, possibly because they called the minute they returned to their home in the Sudan. There wasn’t any hiding under the bed, at any rate – if anything, it was Innogen who had more trouble adjusting to the fact that the two of them were alone in the house together, getting up to do nothing more than stand in the living room and wonder when she’d be able to share her home with another woman again.

Three days later, she and Julian sat in the entry room of a small set of offices that looked as though they could belong to any sort of organization of licensed professionals. Bland, generic landscape pieces were hung on the walls, the carpet didn’t have any pattern to speak of, and there wasn’t even music playing. A secretary and a fish tank were the only outward signs of life. Innogen had loaded up books and games on a padd in case Julian needed help waiting, but nothing she’d brought seemed worthy competition to small yellow goldfish Julian stared at with clear-eyed wonder.

She’d seen to his medical check-up the day before, a basic, almost perfunctory examination to make sure he was physically well, that all his immunizations and inoculations were up-to-date and his teeth were coming in fine – nothing much new. At least that section of his government records carried over no matter where in the country he was going to school.

He was so intent on staring at the fish, he didn’t notice when a woman and a girl walked out of the back offices – a girl Innogen couldn’t tear her own eyes off of. She almost looked like she belonged to a different species, a strange Human alien with a flat, pink face and drooping eyes with a slit of a mouth who walked with a strange, unsteady gait, unlike anything she’d ever seen come from her home planet. 

Then the girl looked at her, waved and smiled. Innogen had no idea what to do in response, how her species talked, and finally forced a smile and wave in return.

“Excuse me.” The woman – the girl’s mother, they had the same hair, the same skin – stepped over to stand next to Innogen, who finally remembered what not to do when making first contact, and looked away from the girl to her mother.

“Yes, may I help you?” 

“Here.” She handed Innogen a sturdy slip of paper, some sort of old-fashioned calling card nobody used outside of movies and trade shows. “This should explain everything about Florence.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what –”

“Everything’s on there,” she said, arm around her daughter’s shoulder. “Have a good afternoon.”

“G’bye,” the girl said thickly as she waved to Innogen again while walking out of the office. She watched them go, then pushed her attention to the card.

_My name is Florence. I have trisomy-21, a spontaneously-occurring genetic disorder which affects less than one out of 2000 Humans and impacts –_

“Julian? Julian Bashir?”

Without looking up from the fish tank, he shook his head, sighed and said, “Sisyphus wept.” Innogen wanted to ask where that came from, but he was already up and walking to the doctor, everything about his posture telegraphing resignation. She understood completely, and grabbed her things to join him.

“Oh, so you’re the Julian I’m supposed to see today,” the doctor smiled at Julian. “And you’re Innogen Bashir?”

“His aunt, yes. And yourself?”

“Doctor Ward.”

“It’s nice to meet you.”

“Thanks, you too.”

“How long do you think will this take?”

“Not too long. An hour and a half. Come on, Julian. Do you need to use the bathroom first?”

“Can I come with –”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid not.”

“Right. Can’t contaminate the results with any outside factors.”

“More or less. Do you need anything?”

“No, I’m all right. I’ll just see you back here when you’re all done.”

Innogen watched them go down the hall, then looked around again. An hour and a half meant at least an hour where she didn’t need to be in the waiting room. She called up the local network on her padd, and after a quick search, made her way to the nearest tea saloon and nursed a pot of soil-grown jade oolong for the better part of an hour and fifteen minutes, with most of that trying not to think about what she knew was coming. When she returned, it wasn’t to what she thought was going to be a short wait; instead, it was to a direct command to head down to Ward’s office.

Like the waiting room, the rest of the office was a fairly archaic design. The individual offices themselves were all separate rooms with little windows on the doors, and Innogen glanced through one as she walked past, but only got a glimpse of a bookcase, a chair, a pinboard and a blur of colour that could have been an abstract painting or her walking too quickly to make sense of a still-life. When she got to Ward’s room, she hesitated before knocking, which was long enough for Ward to look up and see her at the window, smile, and gesture for her to come in before Innogen’s fist could hit the door.

Once inside, the space struck Innogen as more of a living room than an office, and if she’d had to guess she would have said _inviting_ was the underlying design – it was painted in soft colours, with prints of abstract but engaging architectural photographs on the walls. Ward’s desk was in the corner, flanked by bookcases with two chairs and a couch just behind it, but that was the entirety of an adult presence in the room. The couch split the room in half; everything behind it was done with children’s bodies and eyes in mind, small chairs and a low table and shelves of bins stuffed with colourful items of all sorts of shapes and sizes. Julian was kneeling at the table, ignoring or never having even noticed either the available chairs or Innogen’s arrival. He was arranging small coloured shapes into an elaborate pattern that radiated out from the center of the table almost to the edge. It expanded evenly and symmetrically in all directions, using as many shapes of as many colours as possible.

“That’s quite nice,” Innogen said, for lack of anything better to offer as critique.

“We finished a little while ago, so I thought I could let him play a bit,” Ward said. Innogen nodded, still unsure of how to respond, and Ward filled the silence for her. “He’s a lovely boy.”

“I can’t take credit for that.”

“Of course not.” Something in her voice made Innogen look to her face, which had more than a hint of sadness around her eyes. It was the same look she had when she called Innogen the following day, and told her precisely what she’d read in the other five doctors’ reports, none of it the least bit surprising save some sympathy in her voice when she told Innogen that Julian was autistic, and that of all things made Innogen happy she’d had the foresight to close and lock her study’s door to receive the call with some privacy.

“I’m sorry,” she wiped her eyes. “I didn’t think – I wasn’t thinking, I mean, I’m trying to say…I mean to say, thank you. I knew I’d hear it, but I didn’t think actually hearing it would…thank you. For telling me face to face.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And you know why I’m not surprised to hear any of this.”

“I do. I wish I didn’t.”

“Have you dealt with parents like his before?”

“More than I’d like. It’s those parents which – I won’t speak ill of them. They’re desperate, and usually angry, but they don’t feel like they have any other ways to feel.”

“Which is worse, the anger or the desperation?” Innogen swore and bit her tongue. “I’m sorry, you don’t –”

“Silence.”

“Pardon?”

“The ones that don’t come back.” Ward shrugged, a hundred things about the needs of children and desires of their parents and what it meant to be responsible for another Human said so neatly in the gentle rise and fall of her shoulders. Then she looked to something on her desk and back to Innogen, far more professional than when she’d looked away. “I’d like to see you both again next week, if possible.”

“What about this week?”

“Possibly, but I can’t promise. I need to draw up education and therapy plans, and see about assigning a local specialist to his case. I can’t provide the speech therapy or the school liaison work he needs –”

“School liaison?”

“One of the services our organization provides is a long-term caseworker and aide for mainstream school support. From what his case files tell me, and what we’ve spoken about, I can say fairly certainly that Julian’s troubles in school largely came from difficulties with abstract processing, verbal expression and spontaneous communication, rather than a lack of ability to comprehend the material. With that sort of case, having an individual to help him interpret the information is often enough to allow him to maintain a presence within a standard school.”

“That all sounds very nice. And I take it she’s not one of the specialists.”

“No, she wouldn’t be.”

“What would he need in addition to speech therapy?”

“I’d need to see him again to do a more thorough review. But conservatively, going from the other five reports, I’d say some sort of vestibular motion therapy, as well as gross motor motion. His fine motor coordination is excellent, but he needs help with balance and coordination.”

“Right. Of course.”

“It’s not just something he’d have to do here,” she clarified. “I know some non-affiliated programs that would still be able to provide him with the sort of activity he needs. For example, swimming lessons.”

“Tennis, too, I’d expect.”

“I’d wait a few years for tennis.” Innogen blinked; she hadn’t quite been joking about it. “But that sort of thing, yes. Once he gets more comfortable and better with proprioception.”

“Of course,” she repeated.

“I’ll get this all to you as soon as I can, so you can expect it by tomorrow night at the latest. I hope there –”

“There is one last thing, I’m sorry I forgot, but I need to ask. Does eating – well, does eating a certain kind of food make a difference? His parents were feeding him nothing but handmade food for a while, I think they thought it was supposed to help, but I’ve been using replicated and I don’t know if that’s had any major effect on him or not, or if it will if I keep on with it.”

“It won’t. Well, that’s not quite it. Let me put it this way: if you’re feeding Julian, and he’s eating, then you’re doing a good job feeding him. I’ve had patients who began eating better after their parents started feeding them on handmade food, and I’ve had patients who’ve begun eating better when they switched over to replicated nutrient pap. You remember that fad diet from about thirty years back? Like that. The biggest question is whether or not you’re feeding the child. After that, it doesn’t matter quite so much.”

Ward’s generosity with her time and willingness to get in touch with people on Innogen’s behalf made the rest of the appointments and meetings that much easier for everyone. Julian took to swimming beautifully, and some four days after Ward’s initial assessment, the two of them met with Siobhan, the woman assigned to him by joint effort of Ward’s office and the local school district. She was a tall, smooth-faced woman with long hair and a fantastically anachronistic pair of glasses that weren’t a style accessory, but something she genuinely needed that she let both Julian and Innogen handle very gently.

“They’d be five centimeters thick if they were glass instead of transparent aluminum,” she explained, smiling at Innogen’s astonishment at the volume of visual distortion.

“And – why? You can get surgery, right?”

“If my vision gets much worse, I might someday. But right now? If someone sees me wearing glasses, they know right away there’s something different about me,” Siobhan explained. “If someone sees me with this assistive technology, then they won’t think it’s such a bad thing for them to ask for help since it’s clear I’ve already done so. It’s useful for me to demonstrate the _possibility_ of asking for help without getting rid of the underlying condition that makes that asking necessary. It’s easier to ask, after seeing it done. And it gets their children used to the idea of receiving help, too.” Siobhan smiled again. “And if I’m being completely honest about everything, I think I look better with them than without.”

Innogen thought so, too, but didn’t say that out loud; it wouldn’t do for her to make that sort of comment to someone who’d be working so closely with Julian. She handed Siobhan her glasses back instead.

Julian had been patient and quiet enough for most of the day, but had begun fidgeting while they waited for the train to take them back to Innogen’s house. He hadn’t had any swimming lessons that day, and energy was building in him in a bad way – bad enough that even though it was a break in the usual routine, she took the risk and they left the train a stop before their usual one.

Vincent Square was halfway down the street from her house, nearer than any other park or park-like option, and one of the leading amenities listed for her house back when it’d been in the lottery. She’d ignored it at the time, never thinking she’d ever take a child there. It was a small park, not something she’d ever made use of herself except for the tennis courts in summer, but it had open space for running and a small playground for climbing, two activities she knew Julian could use to help him sleep that night. The last time he’d been to London, she’d taken him and his parents to Hyde Park. Julian had loved it – Innogen remembered watching him roll himself down hills laughing the whole time, even when he hit the ground, no matter how hard it happened or how many times his parents told him not to do it again. Vincent Square could fit into Hyde Park many times over, but it had the possibility of still making for a good afternoon outside.

She pushed open the gate, and led him inside. He stared up at the trees, taking in the surroundings before making any decisions or judgments. There were a few children a little older than Julian playing football in the far corner, but they didn’t hold his interest. Instead, when he saw the swing-set in the little playground area, he cried out a wordless exclamation of joy and practically dragged her over before letting go of her hand to run the rest of the way, throw the gate to that area open, and hoist himself up into a free swing’s seat. Without waiting for her to join him, without even asking for a push, he began kicking off against the ground to get going, and it didn’t take long for him to get a good speed and swing on his own.

Innogen walked over, and watched Julian swing himself for a few arcs, tracking where his body was as it moved through the air – he knew to pull himself back and push himself forward to get more momentum going, a trick she remembered picking up on her own when she’d been about his age, too. Hands gripping the chains tight, he kept his eyes open to see the sky and trees as he moved, joy bubbling out of his wide-smiling face, laughter popping as it passed his teeth, nothing getting in the way of his perfect childhood joy. Then – without thinking it through, without _thinking,_ just going – at the height of the swing, she reached out with a hand splayed wide open and pushed him forward to give him more, faster, higher. And Julian kept laughing, in his happiness. Innogen pushed him again and again, getting both hands into it before she stepped away, the better to watch. She felt herself almost rocking on her feet as Julian kept swinging.

Eventually, he found his fill and began dragging his feet on the ground to slow it and come to a full stop. Then he hopped off, and Innogen pressed her hands against her mouth to do her best not to giggle over how many steps it took him to not move like he was either seasick or drunk. 

“Are you ready to go home now?”

“Yes,” Julian said without looking to her, joy still suffused in his voice – and still facing away, he offered her his hand.


	8. Testing 1, 2, 3

When Innogen stepped off the lift and through the doors of the agency, it almost felt like her first day of work all over again: the worries over how to present herself, the fears of not knowing how to do it properly, the sense of holding herself deliberately to hide those fears and worries, the need to prove herself even if just to herself. It almost felt comfortable. She looked around at the reception area, the chairs, the agency’s in-house sign with the partners’ names that she hadn’t quite noticed for most of her morning arrivals from before she’d been called away on what she hoped everyone knew to simply refer to as _family business._

That she’d be leaving just after lunch wasn’t helping her stomach settle all that much. 

The agency’s established policies for single parents and legal guardians were such that Innogen knew she could return to some semblance of the working life she’d left behind. Two days a week, she’d be home in the afternoons alongside Julian, working from home as best she could. The other three days a week, when he had extended social and occupational therapy with Siobhan, she’d be staying on for something much closer to the length of the traditional working day. But on no day would it be the full time she’d been working, not until Julian was a good deal older and better able to take care of himself.

Innogen wanted to hope it might only take him eight years, but tried not to settle on any particular date to look forward to reaching.

Instead, she smiled like she meant it at the receptionist, and holding her head high like she’d always seen in the Lost Queen’s portraits, began the walk back to her desk. She kept her eyes forward, and if anyone looked her way, she didn’t look back.

It was when someone called her name that made her stop.

“Bashir?” Rupert Peterson kept a polite amount of distance, enough to show he wanted to talk to her but not so much it looked like he’d missed her. “Sorry, it’s just that it’s nice to see you today,” he said, not minding that Innogen hadn’t yet spoken and was in fact staring.

“Ah – yes, well, it’s nice to be back in today, Peterson, thank you.” She blinked as she scrambled for time, casting out for a possibility and coming back with downy baby goslings to put an honest smile on her face that had nothing to do with how she felt about her return to the office. “And yourself, you look well.” He nodded in return. She forced her mind to stay on goslings and away from the meeting she’d been pulled out of almost a month ago to the day. “How have things been? I just got back, and I was gearing up on catching up on what I’m certain is a mountain of messages about problems that have already been dealt with, but aside from that…how has it been?”

“Largely the same. Clients came, accounts were closed, we had some meetings. You’ve been missed.”

“Really?”

“Yes. At least by Montero. And myself, as well.”

“Montero? Sylvia Montero?” The two of them had rarely worked together, and while they’d never been anything but polite to each other, Innogen hadn’t ever felt any openness from Montero she felt she could return.

“Yes. We had to jump in and take over the presentation for the Draper meeting with almost no notice after you left, and practically had to Mandrake it – don’t worry, we got the account – but she said it was a shame you weren’t here to do the speaking.” He chuckled as Innogen blinked and stared. “I missed you for that as well. Not just because it was supposed to be you. But you’ve always done well with presentations, with explaining to everyone why this particular font or that certain tagline or colour palette is the one to use. You always – you’re always so _enthusiastic_ for such things, and the clients always respond well to it.”

She nodded, not sure of what to say, falling back on an old standby: “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Peterson smiled again. “It’s good to see you back, Bashir.”

Her desk was as she’d left it, after she’d cleaned up and left with those two agents just a few weeks ago, just at the beginning of summer. No one had come by to disturb anything since then, to lay claim to the space for the duration she was gone. It was still hers, and it had never _stopped_ being hers, the spot she’d grown so fond of that somehow no one else could see the appeal of – a quiet out-of-the-way little place, as near to privacy as she could manage without a door to her name that still gave her a view out a window. The window had been a must, even if claiming it meant positioning herself so far at the edge of the offices that according to her supervisor, she might as well be working outside with the seagulls.

She still liked it, even if the angle of the sun meant she couldn’t keep any plants.

As much as she wanted to catch up on the message backlog and enjoy _being_ at work for the first time in far too long, she only got a few minutes to do so. Her first day hadn’t included a meeting – it’d only been recently she’d achieved enough seniority to warrant automatic inclusion – but it had featured being swept along in the conversations without any hope of catching onto anything, no handholds or footholds for her to use to climb up the cliff, just an un-scalable wall rising up around her with her only hope of escape someone kind enough to notice her to throw her a rope.

She nodded at the right times, and made sure to look busy and attentive by recording everything, though more than half of it was her concern with and assessment of how she was coping with the situation – much more poorly than she would have been happy with, however many compliments and condolences she received. And just like it’d been when she was new, no one else took any notice. When they asked her for input on the layout and flow of the exposition dealership catalogue, she asked if they might have a blank section for people to take notes themselves there within the document, something she’d thought of several minutes earlier and held at the front of her mind in case anyone called on her to ask for a thought. It was more floating than flying or falling; floating on top of a moving river, letting the currents carry her downstream. Mostly carry her.

Everyone was out in time for lunch, and Innogen had a moment to entertain the idea she might well be able to grab something from one of the pantry’s replicators and eat at her desk in her small area of relative privacy and reintegrate herself into the agency’s social tides at her own pace. But there was only time for one such moment, because Miranda stepped up to walk next to her and quietly said, “Hello.”

“Good to see you,” Innogen said in return.

“So nice it didn’t rain today.”

“Quite nice.”

“I know we’re not due for any this week, but the forecast said there might be a chance for some. So it’s nice to see we don’t have to worry.”

“It’s nice to see that sort of thing proved wrong every now and then.”

“It really is.”

“Quite so.”

“I take it you’ve been well?”

“Reasonably so. I’m pleased to be back. How have things been here?”

“Quiet, for the most part. No new major projects yet – nothing galvanizing the agency to Mandrake up something.”

“It’s nice to hear I haven’t missed anything.” The agency’s reputation of pulling its campaigns out of thin air, spinning illusions into reality as the old folk hero did in the American legends, was one of the reasons Innogen had picked it as her claim to her future. “Sometimes it’s a good thing, that nothing much has happened,” Innogen said as they joined the replicator queue.

“It’s usually comforting. Stable, if nothing else.” Miranda sighed. “We’ve missed you, though.”

“I’m sorry if I caused any trouble.”

“Oh, no trouble, nothing like that. Everything was fine. We missed you, but it’s not – there’s no good way to say we missed you but we, as an office and agency, didn’t need you, we got by without you, just pushed ourselves all a little harder.”

“No. But I understand. And I kind of appreciate that. Maybe someday I’ll be needed and missed at the same time. More than I was this time around.”

“I hope it’s soon. Would you like something?”

“A chicken sandwich on rye and a raspberry pop, please.” Miranda placed and received both their orders, and they made their way to a far corner to sit together. She still looked lovely, soft tawny skin and rail-straight black hair streaked with a dozen different shades of pink. Innogen’s own dusky sepia skin and curly, driftwood hair always felt nearly plain in comparison. Innogen looked down at her lunch before Miranda noticed her watching. She took a bite, and a sip, and Miranda did the same.

“And your family’s well?” Miranda asked.

“Pardon?”

“Your family. I heard, and if this is imposing than I’ll withdraw the question, that it had been a family accident.”

“Ah. Not quite an accident, no. But yes, we’re all fine now. There was – there was some trouble, but it’s been cleared up. The situation has been stabilized, if not quite un-fucked.” Miranda smiled at her precise vulgarity. “I’ve had to make some shifts in my life, but everyone’s safe and accounted for.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“Thank you.” The words practically fell out of her mouth, and she didn’t wish she could have stopped them in time. “It’s not been easy. And I’m – it’s nothing.”

“No, it’s all right.” One of Miranda’ graceful hands lay down on the table, close to Innogen without making contact directly. An open invitation, should she accept. “I’m here if you need me.”

“Thank you,” she repeated. “It’s that I’m…there’s been some changes at home. And it’s taking me some time to get used to them. It’s not been easy. It won’t be easy. And I’m thankful that you’re thinking of me. If there’s ever anything I could ask of you, I will.”

“Only if it’s no trouble to you.”

“I’m aware. And I’m still quite thankful for the offer. As I said, if there’s ever anything.”

“Innogen, do you think…do you anticipate there ever being something where I might be able to lend a hand?”

“I don’t know.” But just because she said she didn’t know, didn’t mean that was true. There were easily a dozen things she could ask right then and there, with lunches mostly eaten and the pantry full of coworkers making a hubbub. She had too many things she wanted to say to Miranda, and no way to say any of them. “But I don’t think so. We’ve been managing fine, for now.”

“We.”

“My nephew. He’s come to live with me.”

“Because of the…” She waved her left hand in the air. 

“Because of the, yes,” Innogen said while mirroring Miranda’ gesture with her right.

‘The family thing?”

“The family thing.”

“That’s a good thing to hear.”

“I’m glad I can say it. It’s taken us some time, but we’ve managed to get onto our feet.” She pushed her plate and tray away. “And now that we’re back there, we should be able to stay there.”

“No more stumbling around.”

“I hope not.”

“So you’re back on your feet. And that’s really all the news you have.”

“All the news there is to share.”

“Innogen, you were gone for over a _month_. Do you mean, share with anyone or share with _me_?”

“I wouldn’t see what the difference is.” Innogen measured out her tone into the sort a person might use to let someone know that they’d had enough. Not the tone she wanted to use, not the words she wanted to say, but what she knew she _needed_ to say, and the correct way for her to say it. When there was nothing honest she could say, there wasn’t any point in even making an attempt at giving it a try. Innogen had so many words she wished she could offer to the beautiful woman sitting next to her, the beautiful woman with graceful hands she’d so dearly wanted to dance with, and she forced herself to look away again.

“Of course you won’t.” Miranda gathered their trays to recycle them, and Innogen left the table before she returned.

There wasn’t going to be any dancing. She knew there wouldn’t be any dancing for her, not for a long time. Not with Miranda, or anyone, not soon, maybe not ever again. When Innogen left work, it was far earlier than she wanted, barely late afternoon, and it wasn’t to home, it was to pick up Julian and for them to finally go home together. He couldn’t come home on his own, and she couldn’t impose on Siobhan or his other teachers to take him home themselves; she hardly had any waking moments left to herself now. It’d been not so long ago she’d been able to walk from room to room and out the door and to wherever she liked, her time belonging to no one but herself. The few serious relationships she’d been in, all of her casual partners, none of those women had ever been serious enough for her to even consider sharing her life with them forever, never going farther than sharing little parcels of time. She’d never been _tethered_ like this before.

It should have been easy to be resentful. She was almost waiting for herself to realize that was what she was feeling, but that moment didn’t come. The moment she realized it wouldn’t was on a cold Tuesday afternoon a week later, after she’d picked Julian up from his swimming lesson, after a long day of printing errors and client troubles made longer by transportation delays that Innogen herself could hardly stand and Julian only managed to weather by being so tired from swimming. She’d snapped at him over nothing, and even though she’d immediately apologized for the outburst, the anger hadn’t gone away and Julian was still actively withdrawing from his surroundings. When they finally arrived home it was hard to say which of them wanted to shut the door to their bedroom to lock out the world more, and it was barely four-thirty in the afternoon. Innogen did her best to keep her frustrations out of her voice while she told Julian what to expect for the evening – when they might eat, what his homework for the night would entail – as she made her way to the replicator for something warm and bracing.

“Aunt Innogen?”

“What? I mean, yes, what is it?” 

“May I have something from the replicator?”

“Oh – certainly. Computer, permission granted by Innogen for one order from Julian, you can have it now.”

He nodded, very serious, and cleared his throat to look the part of a professional critic testing out new recipe software, speaking very clearly, “Computer, one order of Aunt Innogen’s most frequent order made most often late in the days around this time.”

“ _Permission approved. Processing order. Processing._ ” The large mug of her favorite jasmine green blend, soothing and gentle, perfect for when she needed a little more peace no matter what time of the year, shimmered into existence. Julian pulled his stepstool over, delicately took it two-handed from the receptacle and without getting down, turned around and held it out to Innogen without quite looking at her.

“Julian, are you trying to get into my good graces to have another snack later?”

He blinked, puzzled. “No I’m not, Aunt Innogen.”

“But you didn’t need…I mean, thank you, Julian. Thank you very much.” She took the tea as gently as she could, keeping her own fingers well away from his hands. Just smelling it made her feel worlds better. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

Julian was already putting his stepstool away. “I’ll see you then, too.” And she was left alone, just for a moment, no one but herself and her tea. That Julian had given her, from the permission for a snack she’d granted to him, given with no thoughts of himself. Because he’d seen she’d needed it more than him.


	9. Light Up My Room

Sundays had always been a day for Innogen to catch up and advance on work. It might have looked good to stay late at the office, but she knew she did her best drafting in her study, alone and quiet at her desk with the north-oriented window that overlooked the garden open eight months of the year. November through February it stayed closed, and with ten days to go until March and opening it back up for springtime no matter how cold the weather would be, she took a moment to stop her sketching and look up and out at the clouds covering the sky. She smiled as she tried to pick out the shapes in them, breathing easily, thinking how she could sculpt them into tangible forms, how the curves would fit and flow, how a hand might hold them. 

Then there was a knock on the door, a series of them, polite but intrusive and disruptive. Innogen sighed, rolled her shoulders, and bit back her annoyance as she called out to Julian, “Yes, you can come in.” She turned and watched him close the door behind him, then stand just in front of it, barely having come into the room at all. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“No, Aunt Innogen.” He looked away from her and around the room, from the framed art on the walls to the glider chair in the corner, before settling his eyes back towards her. They were at her, towards her, but not quite _on_ her. He opened and closed his mouth and flicked his tongue out, breathing deliberately, and before Innogen could ask him anything else his words came all in a rush, “Would it be all right if I read in here with you, please?”

“Well.” That didn’t quite make her feel like smiling. “Have you finished all your schoolwork?”

“Yes, I did.” Julian nodded, not moving any farther into Innogen’s study. “I can leave if you need me to,” he slammed out, looking away from her – just past her, out the window, in her general direction but not towards her at all. His gaze flicked around, outlining her body in space before coming to rest back towards her. Still not quite on her.

“No, I don’t think you need to. If you’ve really, honestly finished all your work, and if you stay quiet, then yes, you can read in here with me. While I’m in here.”

“While you’re in here,” he echoed, nodding.

“Yes.” She watched him look at her bookcases, away from them and back again, before leaving to walk across the hall to his bedroom and quickly return with one of his paper books. It was a generic copy from the house’s utility replicator that would get recycled afterwards, not something like Innogen’s books that had been deliberately crafted in a print-shop or publishing house to be kept and saved – but still better than a padd for his information processing, according to Siobhan. Julian settled into the glider, trying to take up as little space in it as he could as he pushed off and began to read.

When Innogen had given him his first tour of the house, leading him around and showing him what was behind every door, she’d told him her study was off-limits unless she was there to grant permission, a lesson he hadn’t taken to heart right away. Two days later she’d found him at her desk looking through the papers she’d left out. In retrospect it hadn’t been anything she couldn’t have fixed, or even needed to worry about, but at the time the break in privacy had sharply cut to her. And in retrospect, she was relieved she hadn’t yelled. He’d still shrunk back from her, kept his distance from her as best he could, and it was only now that he’d even tried knocking.

She looked up to the clouds, and down at her work. The patterns she’d thought she’d had were now since gone. Julian turned another page.

“Are you enjoying your book?” she asked.

“Very much so, thank you. And yourself?”

“And myself what?”

“Oh, I – oh.” He shook his head, bit his lip, closed his eyes and asked, “Are you enjoying what you’re doing?”

“I – trying to, yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing what I can to finish get these designs done to finish this submission.” Julian peered over towards her desk as best he could from the far corner. Innogen pushed herself to the side, motioned for him to approach, and finally said, “You can come have a look, if you want.”

“Thank you, Aunt Innogen.” He kept his hands behind his back as he took in her sketches, nodding seriously with a very straight face that looked like he was trying to channel some eighty-year-old gallery manager. Turning towards her and still not quite making eye contact, he asked, “What are you sketching?”

“Teacups.”

“What for?”

“Well. At work, I and a few others, we’re working on a set of designs for our project team to pick from, so we can decide which one’s the best for our client. She’s, well, she’s a chef who’s decided to open up a restaurant, and she wants it all to look new. So she doesn’t want to get just what comes out of a replicator for people to eat off of, she wants something new. So we’re coming up with ideas for what that new thing might look like.”

“Oh.” He blinked and looked more closely at one of Innogen’s cloud sketches she was trying to turn into a soup bowl. That particular cloud had made her want to play with gradual colour shifts, though she still wasn’t sure if that playing would take place in each piece, or the overall set. She was leaning towards different parts of the spectrum in each piece. Innogen had only met Corynn Tan once, at the initial meeting, and had tried to take note of what she’d liked in addition to what she said she’d wanted. She knew how much good design required empathy and thought for the part of the end user. Julian didn’t look up at her when he said, “I thought you made posters.”

“I – yes, I do, I make posters. _And_ I make teacups. I make all sorts of things. I made my stool.”

“You made your stool?”

“Yes, I did,” she smiled. “I’m sitting on it right now.” She hopped off and let Julian take it in without anyone using it to distract him. “I didn’t put it together by hand, but it’s my design. My teacher who’d assigned me the project said it was one of the finest examples of cross-species utilitarianism she’d seen in years.” He peered at the object, looking down on the seat and up from underneath, reached out and stroked the closest leg, ran his fingertips over the edge of the seat. “If you’d like one for yourself we could put in an order at a depot. I still have the specs, it wouldn’t –”

“No, it’s all right, Aunt Innogen.”

“If you’re sure.”

“It’s all right, Aunt Innogen.”

“Well, then. May I get back to work?” He moved away from her desk. “Thank you.” He nodded, and before he could speak she opened her mouth and let her words fall out, “But you don’t have to leave if you want to stay. I just need my desk. You can stay in here, as long as you stay quiet. Is that all right with you?”

“That’s very all right with me. Thank you.” Julian settled back into the glider.

“You can always stay in here so long as I’m in here, too. You know that?” He nodded. “All right. Just checking.”

The following Sunday, her designs finally coming to a shape she felt she could manage presenting, Julian knocked for permission again, and after it was granted, settled in for another afternoon of quiet reading at her side. Not every week, but many of them, enough that when she next found him on the floor of her study reading one of the design monographs from her bookshelves, all he needed was gentle reminder.

And when he stopped knocking and simply opened the door, she always let him stay.


	10. Long Way Back Home

Nothing came in the ways Innogen thought it might, when she took the time to consider – usually late at night lying in bed trying to sleep, or early in the day before Julian had woken up. The expectations were always that it would be outpourings, exclamations, overflowing moments of spontaneous signs of social bonding and family love, all the things her single and childless co-workers ridiculed their child-raising officemates for fixating on. From their stories, Innogen had almost thought she knew what to expect.

Instead, it came in the form of cups of tea Julian ordered for her, not for himself. It came when he asked her if she needed to take a shower before he did, or if he could help her tidy up her study when he came in after she’d laid a selection of templates on the floor to better compare them to each other. Once, it came when he insisted on her riding the swings with him – something nearly typical, when she told Siobhan about that particular moment.

She made sure to tell his parents about it, too, when it came time to write them their usual letters. That was the only way to reach them, and more than everything else, it was the strongest reminder of exactly where they were. Julian’s presence in her life was one thing, but the _reason_ for his presence wasn’t always on her mind. When it came to her, it was usually when the two of them sat down to write his parents their letters. The good, old-fashioned kind.

It wasn’t as though they could receive visitors. Innogen could petition for permission to request a hearing for her and Julian to be granted visitation rights, if she wanted, and she was often tempted to do so just on the basis of making sure the channels stayed open. Mars was almost ready for breath-masks outside the cities to become a thing of the past. But she was busy asking for other things from those same channels, and with her life, and with Julian.

Her utility replicator in the broom closet under the stairs could make the envelopes; she’d had to dig around and ask the local public library for a copy of that particular module and they’d been happy to provide. It was already programmed for paper and writing utensils, the same as what she made to use in her study. The office responsible for sending the letters off to Mars was near enough to the agency she didn’t even have to be late in the morning, and from there they’d be processed in due time.

It’d been a surprise to find out her and Julian’s letters were given the same scrutiny and censure as his parents’, just as it had been months of careful, dancing conversation to find that out. No one had bothered to tell her and Julian what it was they weren’t supposed to say, and she’d petitioned to find out – drawing on friends’ advice over carefully worded questions she delivered with a practiced spontaneity, on the guidance of Siobhan’s coworkers willing to lend a hand when it came to working through a bureaucracy – and didn’t stop until she and Julian were finally informed about what they needed to know, most likely to simply get them to stop asking. There would be no discussion of the attempted treason itself, no hints to what they might or might not have done, and there was to be no detail about their sentence and the prison itself that didn’t first see the censor’s approval. 

If she was someone else, Innogen knew she would have doubled down, gone forth to ask for even yet more, to find out if she and Julian might take a ferry over to Mars and see his parents in person. But it had been almost half a year to be granted as much as she had been, and she’d had to claim leadership of the Flanagan account because no one else had stepped forward, and Julian needed her as present as she could be to help him with his new courses in speech therapy. She didn’t want to lie to herself, or to Julian, and rather than tell herself she’d look into it when she found the time, she took comfort in what she’d learned when she’d first been informed of their arrest: that they’d be transferred to Earth with good behavior, and released early with more of the same, and when they returned home, they’d be allowed visitors without any of the Martian penal restrictions. They’d be in the same room together someday – not someday soon, but a someday she could see.

In the meantime, contacting them had become a ritual. Of finding the time for her and Julian to sit down together, get out their paper and pens, and write their letters. Innogen knew there was always time when they made it a priority to carve it out, even if she had to carve it out with her fingernails: time for work, time to stay late at work if she had to, time to go out dancing and bring a woman home with her, time to sit and think and do absolutely nothing if she wanted. There’d always been time, until Julian, a diamond-strong tether keeping her from floating away as she might once have done.

She was learning there was still just as much time as she’d always had. It just wasn’t hers and hers alone anymore.

When the weather got nice, Julian helped her arrange furniture out on the backyard patio and they wrote their letters outside. Every so often, he’d cut off a leaf from the ivy that grew over the southern wall or take a bright orange-and-red one that had blown off the vines and press that between fresh sheets of paper and include it in with his letter – that, at least, was always allowed past the censors. On days when the weather wasn’t so amenable to written correspondence, they wrote them inside.

She made Julian a cup of bittersweet hot chocolate, which he accepted with a nod that didn’t bring his eyes up to meet hers. “Thank you, Aunt Innogen.”

“You’re welcome, Julian.”

She made herself a cup of pine-smoked black tea, and watched Julian take his drink to the front room and set it down on a coaster before kneeling on the floor beside the table, then picking the mug back up to first smell and then drink, a ritual he always performed with a practiced theatricality. Just as he’d once seen an actress on a holovid drama drink her hot chocolate, so did he always drink his own. Innogen herself had taken one of the larger books from her bedroom down to use as an impromptu writing surface, the better for her to sit on the couch and leave Julian the entire floor.

“Have you thought about what you’ll say in your letter?” 

“Yes, I have.”

“What are you going to tell them about?”

“I think I might tell them, we’re starting these little story-writing things in class, we pick a painting or a picture and try to write the story of what happened behind it. Before it, or after, the story the painting’s telling; that’s just a little _bit_ of the story. We got these great little, they gave us pictures to hold, not just look at, and I wanted to pick one Siobhan would like but she said I should be picking one out for me, so I found this one but this other girl wanted it, it was these girls in…I thought they were in swimsuits but it was acrobatic suits, acrobats gathering oranges, and I got to do it even though the other girl wanted it.”

“That’s quite a lot to tell them. You’d better make sure you’ve got enough paper for it all. Will you tell them the story about the acrobats, or just the story about that story?”

“I think I’ll tell them that story, too.”

“Would you tell it to me sometime? I’d quite like to hear it myself.”

“You can come to class and hear it.”

“I could? When is this? Does Siobhan know about it? I sometimes think I should be asking her instead of you for news about what’s happening in school.”

Julian pulled a face, his way of saying _please be honest with me_ that did nothing so much as make him look like a teenager years ahead of schedule, and she managed to only just keep from laughing. The sight was always so incongruous. “Mister Fisher told everyone,” he said.

“That’s right, he did. I’m sorry, I should have remembered.” That mollified him, and he took another ritualized sip of hot chocolate. She took a drink of her tea as she watched the rain come down and hit the window. There was another lightning flash, and a thunderclap that Julian flinched at – and then he shook his shoulders, took another sip, and went back to writing. Innogen went back to watching the rain.

“Aren’t you going to start?” he asked sometime later.

“In a moment,” she said.

There was a good deal she couldn’t tell them about. She hated jumping the gun on things which hadn’t yet come to pass, and as excited as she was about the prospects of Julian’s upcoming class presentation – and she _would_ have to speak to Siobhan about it, find out if they’d need to rehearse or do anything in particular to prepare Julian for it – she didn’t know enough for her to say anything Julian couldn’t say himself. Better to let him talk about it, for now.

Every time she wrote to Julian’s parents, she always composed two letters: the one she sent them, and the one she didn’t. There was more and more she couldn’t tell them, wouldn’t consider sharing, that she knew was best to keep to herself. They didn’t need to hear how angry she still became when someone at the office forgot about Julian and offered her an invitation to go out for drinks without any advance notice to find someone to look after him for a night. It wasn’t important for them to hear how it took only six months of speech therapy to wash every trace of Estuary out of his voice, something Innogen still slipped into sometimes when she was particularly drunk. She didn’t need to say how much it hurt to never even hint of a whisper of the nature of the crime which imprisoned them – more than once she’d thought murder would be easier to explain than treason.

With a sigh, she picked up pen and paper and began writing about the office’s new intern and how her training was coming along – a good sense of composition and colour, but only the most straightforward drafting skills and a shaky sense of perspective when it came to illustration work. Innogen wrote about the Flanagan account, how the Irish chocolatier needed a new set of logos and an advertising campaign for her boutique and Innogen had grabbed the reins when no one else was willing to. And she wrote about Julian’s swimming lessons, something that made her stop to smile more than once. She made sure to write about how wonderfully he was doing in the water, well above both his age and peer group, and at the end of lessons, he often asked for the instructor to pick him up and bodily fling him into the water as a special treat, throw him as far and hard as he could go. It was more difficult now that he was coming up on eight – which meant he was only fighting harder to take to the diving boards, even if the high dive still intimidated him.

The next day, in full sunshine, she sent the letters off to Mars. As soon as they’d been handed to the proper clerk who would begin the process of putting them on their way, the moment they left her hands, she began composing the next one she’d send off. Rehearsing the words she’d write when she and Julian received letters of their own. Their delivery and reading came with the same amount of ritual as the composition and sending: called back into the same office to be handed the return correspondence, then making the time for her and Julian to find a place to sit and read them together. But it wasn’t quite a mirrored exchange. She and Julian each wrote a letter to Julian’s parents, for the two of them to share, but his parents collaborated on a pair of letters with one going to Julian and another to Innogen. They weren’t quite the same, and much as she wanted to, Innogen didn’t allow herself to press or pry when it came to the precise contents of Julian’s. She didn’t even read them when she had a chance.

It hadn’t been hard to find them. She didn’t even think it could be called _spying_ , not when all she’d done was check each of his desk’s drawers, then crouch down and peer under his bed, and finally open his closet and part the coats to find a little box pushed off into a far corner nearly hidden in the dark. The whole affair seemed almost parental, and she opened the lid just enough to make sure they were, in fact, his parents’ letters before putting everything back as close to as she’d found it as she could. She’d left them alone, not reading a single word, and stood in Julian’s room and looked around, taking in the difference in the space after a year of him living in it. There was more to it than the bed, the desk, the bear on the bed: it was in the _filling_ of the room with the presence of a full-time resident. She could see it in the leaves and stones and sticks placed just so atop the windowsill, in an arrangement she’d never asked Julian to explain to her. It was in the heavy curtains on the window, and the strings of fairy lights they’d wound around those curtains and windows as well.

Innogen sat on his bed for a moment, looking around at the books and papers he’d accumulated in the past year, before getting up, smoothing out the bed, and returning to her study for a few minutes’ solitude before she had to leave to pick him up from Siobhan’s social tutoring.

The letters she received were stored in her office, in a box on a high shelf. She didn’t often take them out to read them. But in the living room or out in the backyard, there, reading his parents’ letters together when they first arrived all new, there they shared what they liked with each other, sometimes even letting them handle and read them on their own. They’d take in the delicate nature of the handwriting, and run their fingers around the edges of the empty spaces – the words lost in transit – and tried, as they always did, to define the void by its boundaries.


	11. One Week

If she’d been married, Innogen knew she or her wife would look after Julian on his school holidays, possibly alternating days if they both worked or Innogen keeping on her work at the office as she always did with her wife looking after him during the days off from school. Since she wasn’t, even if the term wasn’t quite correct in describing her relationship to Julian, she took the same type of leave as the rest of the single parents in the agency. He still had his swimming lessons, social tutoring, and a number of day programmes that focused on crafts and arts. Both of them were kept happily busy, and still, with all of Julian’s education and Innogen’s work, they found time to take for just the two of them.

Hyde Park was one of Julian’s most frequent requests, and Innogen almost always granted it. Circumstances in which she insisted on someplace else were uncommon enough that if she explained herself, Julian would acquiesce to her wants for an afternoon. But it wasn’t one of those days. It was nearly Julian’s ninth birthday, and they had very little planned for it: family would come over, and there would be a trip to eat someplace fancy for dinner, and in the upcoming days, there was nothing but anticipation, and his hand in hers as they walked home from the park in the late summer rains. Natural English rain, not manmade, faint and gentle on the skin, obscuring the sky, and while Innogen didn’t mind the rain on her face quite so much, Julian kept his hood pulled down low as he walked beside her – which was why she spotted the woman with her dog before Julian did.

It was just as well. Siobhan always spoke about how Innogen needed to set a good example for Julian, and even if she barely had enough time to gather her words together, she still did her best, not quickening her pace to move past and away from the encounter, but keeping on walking at the same speed and then stopped, first making deliberate eye contact and then breaking it immediately to get to the subject at hand: “Excuse me, but may I pet your dog?”

“Oh!” She nodded back at Innogen. “Yes, certainly you can. Sit, Vanilla.”

“Vanilla? Sweet name for a sweet girl.” Innogen crouched down to better reach the dog. “What kind is she? Is she a girl?”

“Yes, she is. She’s a Siberian Silver Vulpine, and she’s three years old.”

“Very pretty girl.” Dogs weren’t quite Innogen’s favorite animal – she always thought it strange how they kept looking at people’s faces, as though they had to keep checking they were there, when all they needed to do was sniff the air to check. Still, they were sweet enough, and often downright cute, and she did love it when they looked at her face as long as she was looking back at them. “You’re lucky to have such a nice Human of your own, yes you are, willing to share you, yes she is.”

“Thank you,” she blushed.

“I mean it. I wasn’t –”

“Oh, would you like to pet her too?”

Julian was peering out from underneath his rain hood, holding it to the side like he was peering out from hiding behind a curtain, and didn’t say anything. He wasn’t quite looking at the woman, or her dog, but glanced in their general direction, and then away, coming back and returning to her again and again. Then, before Innogen could remind him of his most recent lessons with Siobhan, he said to her, “I would like to pet her, yes. Thank you.”

“Go right ahead.”

He didn’t have to crouch to reach the dog’s head, and didn’t smile when his hand touched her fur, but looked quite pleased with things just the same.

“She’s a pretty cat, isn’t she?” Innogen teased.

“She’s a _dog_ , Aunt Innogen,” Julian huffed, and pulled his hand away. “I know what the differences are. This dog’s got a dog’s nose.” The woman looked down at them, and Innogen waved away the frown on her face, cheeks burning even in the light rain.

“It’s just a joke between us. Don’t worry yourself over it. Though, I’m sorry I forgot, my name’s Innogen, and this is Julian.”

“Rosalind.”

“It’s good to meet you, Rosalind,” Julian said from underneath his hood – he was back to peering out of it and not looking at anyone, but was staying within the moment, which Innogen took to her favor.

“It is, yes,” Innogen said. Rosalind smiled down at her, and Innogen felt her cheeks burning again, for a very different reason. She was a gorgeous woman, dark red hair and a sweet, open smile. It’d been a long time since she’d been smiled at like that. Maybe it was a little dishonest of her to have pulled the dog into things, but dogs were one of the few ways people could use to openly talk to each other, and though she wasn’t always too keen on them, Innogen was always grateful for the help they provided. “He’s my nephew,” she blurted.

“Oh.” Rosalind suddenly had on the precise blank face that meant people were holding themselves empty instead of asking what they wanted to know.

“He’s just living with me for a while.”

“Oh,” she repeated, life coming back to her cheeks.

“My parents are living offworld, but they’ll be back soon,” Julian told her without looking towards her, instead staring up towards the rooftops and sky. It was what he knew to say to save face, and it seemed to satisfy her. Innogen swore to herself anyway; she’d have to tell Siobhan to talk to him about when to volunteer information and when to simply remain silent.

“Everyone decided it’d be easier for Julian to stay on Earth, so he’s with me for a while. But they’ll be back soon.” Innogen finally stood, her feet tingling, and blinked when she saw she was just a bit taller – Bashirs always leaned towards tall – and smiled as she ran a hand over her head, pulling her hair back from her face. “So do you live around here? Julian and I are just heading home.”

“Not quite _around_ here, but nearby.”

“Yes, this is –”

“Aunt Innogen, look!” Julian was smiling, staring off at something, and Innogen and Rosalind and Vanilla had to track his gaze, look where his eyes were focused and follow them to see what had made him cry out in excitement: “Look, it’s the pigeons!” 

One of the little urban flocks that lived near the Park, coming from God knew where, flapping through the disappearing rain, around and around the rooftops to disappear and reemerge and finally settle onto the roofs just above the gutters, calm and collected despite having no way to leave the weather behind.

“I don’t think I’d have noticed them,” Rosalind said.

“Why?” Julian asked.

“I – excuse me?”

“Why wouldn’t you have noticed them? I always notice them. Look, there’s that red one.”

“Julian, _not_ now,” Innogen said. “I’m sorry, I should have said he’s autistic, he’s not so –”

“There’s that red one with the big white spot on its back, that one’s my favorite,” Julian pressed on, heedless of what Innogen was trying to say. “It’s the prettiest one in the flock, I always try to look for it when we go to Hyde Park. Why don’t you pay attention to the pigeons?”

“I don’t see it,” Rosalind said.

“But it’s right there.”

“Where?”

“Right _there_.”

“Well, can you show me?”

“It’s just –” And it wasn’t a grand, sweeping gesture, and it was much more than enough for Innogen to smile in pride and joy. Even Vanilla watched as Julian raised his hand, index finger extended, to point – to _point_ – towards his favorite red-and-white pigeon, showing them just where it was to be found.


	12. Next Time

“If you aren’t sure what you ought to say, then just say something polite.”

“All right.”

“If it gets to be too much for you, tell me.”

“I will.”

“If you _think_ it’s going to get to be too much, tell me.”

“I will, Aunt Innogen.”

“If you need –”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Will you tell me what, Julian? Since you knew what I was going to say before I said it, I’d like to know what you thought I was going to say.”

He rolled his eyes and sighed, and without looking to her face or letting go of her hand, said, “If I need to go somewhere quiet by myself I tell you where and when I’m going so if we have to leave suddenly you can get me without me making us wait longer because you had to go looking.”

“That’s exactly the answer I was looking for,” Innogen said, surprised and delighted at the depth of it as they walked out from the lift onto the agency’s floor. They stopped just at the entryway, beside the sign she loved so much, and let Julian take a moment to take it in. “Eyes to my face, please, Julian. I want to make sure you’re looking at me for this. Thank you. We aren’t going to stay for the whole party. But we do need to stay for some of it. We’re going to be here at least forty-five minutes. I know you don’t want to be here, and keep your eyes up on my face for this, please, yes I know, don’t pull that face on me. And now, because I think I need to remind you again, we’re staying as long as we are because these people are important, and I can’t just go in, say hello, and leave. We have to stay so I can talk to them.”

He looked away, bit his lip and shook his head, and turned back to look towards her, though not meeting her eyes a third time, not even momentarily. “All right. Let’s go in.”

There was a coat check set up at the reception desk run by the new intern Orchid, who looked up from her paper-and-ink book the moment they came in the door, and put it aside to put on a decent mimic of a smile. “Hello, good to see you, may I take your coats?”

“Yes, thank you. Julian?” 

He shrugged off his jacket, folded it carefully over his arm like he was thirty-five years old instead of nine, and thanked Innogen appropriately when she took it from him. Then he thanked Orchid as well when she took both garments from Innogen in exchange for a little marking stub, echoing Innogen’s own statement of gratitude. If it was any other night, she might well have taken him aside to give him a short reminder on appropriate times and places for thanks-givings, but tonight, she just stuck the stub into her purse and gently took Julian’s hand as they walked through a second set of doors, past the bathrooms that she made sure to point out to Julian, and on down the hallways to the party itself, following the flow of noises, scents, people. She recognized the few individuals lingering in the near-empty offices, wanting quiet conversations or just a moment of privacy, and she hurried Julian along to make sure they got it, until they turned the last corner and the party sang through the open doors, beckoning them inside. Even from outside she could smell the bright sharpness of the spices, all the food handmade, always, every delightful little piece _crafted_ one by one – the glasses for the drinks that kept catching the lights were all replicated, but she could see the bartender with her phalanx of bottles full of spirits and synthehols that practically danced at her command – with the murmuration of the crowd and the low noises all blending together to one joyful sound.

Innogen opened the doors, and closed her eyes for a moment to let everything flow over and around her without feeling any need to come up for air. The wave crested and carried her to shore, and she and Julian walked into the party. People were happy to see her and surprised to see Julian, and thankfully he had a firm enough idea of what he ought to be doing when it came to answering the questions people posed to him. He was polite, and efficient, and took a breath before anything difficult. Riding the currents of the crowd, just like she’d learned to do when she’d first come to London.

She’d missed the last two holiday parties, something she’d finally managed to give up feeling bitter about. Julian’s first year living with her had been difficult for both of them, and it’d been easy to decline the invitation. His second year had been somewhat better, but she hadn’t tried to look for anyone to take care of him for a night, not when she still didn’t know if she trusted anyone enough to push that level of responsibility onto them.

This year, God had laughed. She’d spent two weeks certain she’d found someone she could trust, and then the girl had called to apologize and explain she’d gotten her travel dates wrong. So with just a week left before the party, rather than scramble around and try to find someone else, she’d sat Julian down in the living room and explained to him in no uncertain terms that they were going to the agency’s holiday party, he was to come along with her, they’d have to go out to a shop to get him fitted for a formal outfit for the occasion, he couldn’t do anything to get himself out of going short of cutting off both his feet, and if he did so he’d have to wait that much longer to start tennis lessons.

Somehow, it had worked.

She hadn’t forgotten how bountiful the agency’s parties could be, but it still took her by surprise. Such were the benefits of working with the sort of people that helped make that happen. The first agency party she’d ever attended had been more than a decade ago, when she’d only been employed for three months and then only as an intern. She’d worn a long blue dress that had been the best she’d had in her closet that still hadn’t been quite fancy enough at the party itself. When she’d seen that, she gave herself a moment to worry about her appearance before she put on a strong face, stood tall, and threw herself into conversations. Even if other people hadn’t liked what she was wearing, no one said a word to her about it. The following year, a month ahead of time, she’d marched up to one of the senior partners and asked her where she might find something suitable for the event; the year after that, she just took a day to explore through the city’s vintage collector shops and let herself find something she liked.

This year, Julian’s fingers were wrapped around hers and squeezing almost tight enough to hurt, and she squeezed back as she looked down at him. “Do you want something to drink? I’m going to get something to drink, you can have something too, if you’d like.” He shrugged, so she led them over, breezing past everyone who tossed a greeting her way. “One Tommy Gun and a lemonade, please.”

“I’ll take a shot of Saratoga,” Julian said.

“I –what?” Innogen did a double-take at the seriousness of his tone as the bartender burst out laughing. “No, Julian, you won’t be getting any Saratoga, you’ll be getting a lemonade. Where did you even _hear_ that?”

“I like a man with good taste in rum.” The bartender winked at Julian as she handed Innogen the drinks. “Come back in ten years, I’ll be glad to serve you then.”

“All right. Thank you.”

Beverages in hand, they turned back to face the party. Innogen watched Julian take a gentle sip and look around the room, canvassing the place, and he clearly liked what he saw because he stopped looking and focused his gaze on one of the food tables. They’d had a small dinner beforehand, enough that Julian wouldn’t get cranky from waiting or sick from too many pastries, but there was still such a thing as _just enough_ pastries.

The only chairs were around the edges of the room, with the tables placed at an adult Human’s height. Not that anyone was using them for much besides a place to put glasses and plates, and then only after they’d finishing eating or drinking. It was easy enough to find one to hold their drinks for just long enough that Innogen could get Julian and herself some of Corynn Tan’s little swans and roses before they were completely gone. The swans, especially. She wasn’t normally a fan of that sort of thing, but the feuilletine wings broke off with the most satisfying little snapping sounds, and when they dissolved to a faint white vanilla sweetness as soon as they touched her tongue, she let herself indulge and closed her eyes and moaned, very quietly.

Julian did much the same when he ate one himself, except he made a higher-pitched sound of surprise and his entire body quivered before he went quiet and still to finish off the rest of it. He ate all three she’d brought him, slow at first and then much faster: the last two were gone in the same amount of time as the first one had taken by itself. She’d also gotten him a pair of miniature pistachio tarts, and those were quickly gobbled up too. When he was done, she was still nibbling on a mango-orange truffle, and dared to ask him how he was enjoying himself.

“It’s very nice. I like all the different kinds of people I can see here.”

Innogen nodded and took a deep breath before she said anything. “I agree that’s a very nice thing to see at any party. And I –”

“Siobhan and I talked about not looking at someone just because they aren’t Human,” he said with all the irritation a nine-year-old could muster when confronted with over-serious adults.

“Then since that’s the case, I don’t think we need to talk about it again.”

Julian sighed. “Do we _want_ to talk about it again?”

“I do. But I can tell you don’t, so I think we’ll wait until tomorrow. Is that all right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Is there anything else you like here? The pastries, the music?”

“I like the pastries. I don’t like the music.” He was being rather serious; she could tell from how he was looking in the general direction of people and not at any one in particular, how he said it so easily without any effort or force behind the thoughts.

“What don’t you like about it?”

“The way it sounds. It doesn’t sound put-together. I don’t like that.”

“It doesn’t sound put-together.”

“The last song that played. The sound on top, the sort of spinning sound,” he twirled his fingers by his head for emphasis, “that part didn’t sound like it belonged with the rest of the song. Everything under it. I didn’t like that. There was another song they played that had good sound on the bottom, but the singing was too close to it, and that wasn’t nice.” Julian shrugged, clearly resigned to his situation. “Maybe they’ll play some Ophelia.”

“I can ask if they will. Is there anyone else you’d like to hear?”

“Just Ophelia.”

“Then I’ll ask if they have any of her songs, and I’ll be right back as soon as I do. Is there anything you’d like me to get you? Another lemonade?”

“I can get myself another lemonade if I want one.”

“Yes, but as long as I’m going I’ll get you another lemonade. I’ll be right back.”

The DJ listened politely when she explained the situation, and said he’d put three of Ophelia’s songs into the queue with the promise one of them would be the song after next. With that, and a fresh glass of lemonade in one hand and a snifter of aged Somerset Shipwreck cider brandy in the other, she was on her way back to Julian when she was waylaid by Gehaunis. She was also drinking Shipwreck, except that her beak meant she had to do so out of a bowl instead of a glass. They hadn’t had much time to talk over the last few months, and catching up was one of the reasons Innogen had wanted to come to this particular party; she could take a moment to talk about nothing in particular.

One moment turned into two turned into three, and she got another shot of Shipwreck and a fresh glass of lemonade by the time the first of the three Ophelia songs was fading out for Electric Crayon to take their place. It was an early Electric Crayon song, from before the band dropped the ‘Richard Chu With’ from the front of their name, something that had been playing in all the clubs and dance halls when Innogen had first moved to London, when she was still sharing housing, lugging a hard copy of her portfolio with her to interviews in the hopes that would make a sound impression, and she still had the case and folders in her office somewhere. It might be fun to take them out and look at them again and see how far she’d come. Laugh a bit, maybe. She laughed a bit right then, and had to explain to Julian she was quite all right, just very happy to be at the party.

“Oh, yes. Apologies, I’ve forgotten my manners. Julian, this is Chedosi Gehaunis, from the agency’s legal department. You can call her Miss Gehaunis. Miss Gehaunis, this is my nephew, Julian. You can call him Julian.”

“It’s nice t’finally meet you, Julian,” Gehaunis chirped, dipping and turning her head to look at him first out of her left eye, then her right, the best she could do to offer a friendly nonverbal greeting when she couldn’t mimic a Human smile.

“You too, yes, you too. It’s good to meet you too, Miss Gehaunis.”

“Innogen’s told me plenty about you. So you’re in tennis lessons now?”

“Almost in. I will be soon. I want to be. Do you play tennis?”

“’Fraid not, can’t deal with the short-pace running, not with my feet. But I’ve always liked watchin’ it played.” She flicked her nictitating membranes without breaking eye contact, and Julian kept on looking right to her face. It was the longest time Innogen had seen him sustain eye contact with anyone, even with Gehaunis’ nictitating blink, something she always said it was a good tactic in audits with species that only had one set of eyelids. For some reason Innogen couldn’t name or deny, it wasn’t quite working on Julian, who kept looking at her face while they traded bits and pieces of conversation. He nodded, he blinked, and he never moved his eyes away.

Then she looked at the rest of him: how he wasn’t gripping his plate and was sipping easily at his lemonade, even keeping in mind the sharpness of his posture. He was putting his voice out with more modulation than usual, and Innogen could hear how his words were coming faster without the usual care he gave to them, something he always did when he was either very nervous or quite relaxed. And even though Gehaunis had lived on Earth for almost nine years now, she still had trouble reading Humans sometimes – typical Humans, at that, never mind one like Julian – and she didn’t make any sign she was bothered, either.

Innogen shivered, and the moment shifted when she spotted Sebastian and his husband Ferdinand, and waved them over the moment Ferdinand looked in her direction. Sebastian and Ferdinand brought Mari and Qiáng with them, and Innogen took a moment to think about how married couples always traveled together before she introduced all four of them to Julian.

He was good enough to look everyone in the eye as he said hello, greeting everyone in turn, a fine amount of good-to-meet-yous and how-do-you-dos, answering all the questions asked of him politely and promptly. A few of the answers came out a little more smoothly than the rest, the same answers he’d provided several times already – the ones he had rehearsed enough to be a little playful with when he talked about swimming lessons and his math classes. Then she saw him wrenching his gaze down to the floor a moment, forcibly relaxing himself by looking away to something that couldn’t look back, and then he looked to Innogen and said he needed to go use the bathroom.

“Certainly.” He handed his glass to her and made his exit.

“Nice kid,” Mari said.

“He is, rather,” Innogen replied.

“Why haven’t we had the chance to meet him yet?”

“This was the first year I thought he could manage one of these parties himself.”

“Ah,” Sebastian sighed in agreement. “Erin’s a long way from coming to one of these.”

“How is Erin doing? Did you call that violin teacher yet?”

“Not yet – she said she’d rather play sitting down, so we might try cello or –”

“Oh!” Everyone looked at Innogen, Gehaunis’ crest rising in surprise. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just that Julian requested this one,” she pointed to the ceiling, “and it’s a bit of a shame he’s missing it.”

“He likes Ophelia?” Qiáng asked. “That’s pretty good taste for a nine-year-old.”

“Yes, well, it’d be better taste if he liked other musicians _besides_ Ophelia.”

“What, he only listens to her?” Ferdinand asked.

“Not quite. He likes Ophelia, he likes These Comedians, and he likes What About Pedro.” They all looked at her, expectant.

“And?” Sebastian finally asked.

“And that’s all the music he likes.”

“That’s _it_?”

“All of it. He won’t leave the room or ask me to turn it off if something else is playing, but those three are all he ever asks for, and all he has on his player.”

“Just those?” Qiáng asked.

“Just those,” Innogen echoed.

“It took Beatrice a while to get to listen to something besides her old albums –”

If it was any other time, Innogen would have lain down every instance in the last eighteen months she checked Julian’s player for the hope of something beyond those eight albums. She’d tell them how he wouldn’t acknowledge anything else she ever gave him or tried playing for him. How it was one of the battles she’d let fall to the wayside because she knew it wasn’t worth it when he still struggled with so many other more important things. That it was something she wished she had the energy for, because it was such a small, insignificant thing, that for an autistic person, those small things meant the world. But this was a party, and everyone was supposed to be happy at parties. So Innogen listened, nodded, shrugged, smiled, and said, “I think I might have some success with this one mix I made.”

“Good way t’do it,” Gehaunis said. “What would you put on there?”

“It’d have to be music _like_ what he’s already listening to. So maybe Rat Kings, or Medieval Jukebox. Maybe even Susan Fisher – I think he might like her, actually, but I haven’t asked.”

“It’s always hard to just ask if they like music,” Qiáng nodded. “Around nine children get defensive of what they like…”

“Thanks for the warning.” Sebastian said. 

“Oh, God, listen to us,” Mari moaned, “standing around talking about what music young children are listening to these days. It’s finally happened. We’ve all become our parents.”

Everyone let out a huge laugh at that; even Gehaunis, who was missing some of the cultural background, thrummed along with everyone. Ferdinand went to get the last of the truffles from the food table, and when he got back, she glanced at the clock on the wall and saw it’d been forty-five minutes. They could leave whenever Julian was ready. She would have asked him if he was when he got back from the bathroom, except that when he did, he had something which made her wish she’d had another shot of brandy.

“Julian, where did you find that?”

“By the bathroom,” he answered, glancing at her out of the corner of his eyes without looking up to her or letting go of the glove.

“Was it just lying on the floor?” He nodded. “Then someone must be looking for it. Go take it to Orchid at the coat check, that’s where someone would go looking.”

“All right, Aunt Innogen.”

Everyone watched him go. It was Gehaunis who asked, “What was that?”

“That? That’s just a thing he does. He’s gotten it into his head to start collecting gloves. I wish I knew where it came from – he just started in with it one day. He doesn’t even ask me to buy them for him, he just _finds_ them, and collects them, he won’t even wear them, just hang onto them for – oh, good, Julian, you’re here.” It was also the cue to make their exit. She’d done enough socializing, and so had Julian, who was doing everything he could to tell her he was getting close to it being too much for him without saying so out loud. Asking him wouldn’t have done either of them any favors, not with an audience. He said good-bye to everyone without a fuss, and when they arrived home he went right to bed without any protest, a definite sign he’d worn himself out and then some. The next day or two might be difficult – sometimes it was as though he’d use up all of his social graces and needed time for them to be replenished – but that was something she’d dealt with before, and could deal with it again.

Even for as well as she knew him, she couldn’t puzzle out his glove fascination. All she knew was that it wasn’t for the clothing itself: he never asked her for an extra pair if he saw them in a shop window or on someone’ hands. They only caught his attention when it was one glove alone, tossed aside and half-hidden under a pile of leaves in a park or soaking wet in a gutter or left on the floor in the hall by the restroom. He practically had radar for them, and always insisted on taking the ones he found home with him. And like his taste in music, it was one of the battles she knew she wouldn’t fight. She washed his findings with the rest of the laundry, and then Julian would add them to his collection. When he’d last shown it to her at the start of November, all proud of his treasure, he’d collected thirty. Now it was nearly the end of December, and she could think of at least three more he’d come across besides the one earlier that night he hadn’t managed to bring with him. If he’d stuck it in a pocket, then he might well have, and someone at the party would be out a glove.

There were always gloves to be found this time of year.

It was also the time of year for the Yule Address, something Julian had long ago incorporated into his London life, and one of the most honestly pleasant experiences Innogen had that she could share with him. She replicated a hot chocolate for him and he made tea for her, and together, on the couch in the living room, they watched the Duchess of Gloucester speak out to England, almost but not quite the same as the year before, and the year before that. Following the regular rituals, the way the Address was done, and had always been, as far as Innogen could remember. There was the wish for the Lost Queen to return from hiding, or one of her children to claim her legacy, and the hope that they would all live to see it come to pass. She spoke about national parks, and the theatre; about education, and summer holidays. It was a year to take delight in England, in the bounty of the land and the people, and Innogen wondered if the Duchess’ successor, whomever that might be, would be a little less conservative when it came to avoiding mentioning species by name.

After it was over, Julian taking the cups back to be recycled, she scrolled through the media center’s queue to browse the recent watching history – and three down from the Address was the movie _See You Next Wednesday_ that she and Julian had both so enjoyed, particularly the scene where the hard-boiled twentieth-century-type detective had walked into a bar and ordered a shot of Saratoga rum.


	13. Peterborough And The Kawarthas

Travel wasn’t something Innogen had ever done much, even before Julian came into her life. When she’d been growing up, there’d been trips overseas to see relatives in order to attend weddings and funerals and major life events that required even the most far-flung cousins for a complete family reunion, the sort of which usually came around about every two years. It had never been just to go and see them. When her family had wanted travel for its own sake, they never left England, and when they’d left Guildford it’d usually been to the sea.

Even as an adult, she’d largely stayed at home. When she’d been invited to go with her friends on the usual six-week holiday throughout Southeast Asia after they’d all graduated secondary school, she’d turned them down so she could dive into school applications. Celebrating that graduation took her as far as Wembley and one of the best handmade meals she’d ever eaten, and the next day she was back to work, busy tackling the interviews for entry-level internships that would lead her to a staff position at a reputable agency.

It’d been Julian’s father who’d taken up traveling as a hobby. He’d never been one to focus as Innogen did, never put himself into a career the way she had, and he’d seemed happy enough with that – she hadn’t wanted his life and he hadn’t wanted hers. Julian had been the eventual outcome of one of his father’s journeys. One of his father’s visits to Africa lead to him taking another, and another, and soon enough he’d brought himself home a wife. Julian’s mother had settled into England within a month, and Julian arrived a year after that. His mother had sometimes talked about taking Julian to see where she’d come from, but that hadn’t come to pass, and Innogen made sure to never mention how the letters she received from his mother often spoke about her wish to do exactly that when she was finally released.

Maybe it was finally getting a letter without anything cut out that pushed Innogen to jump onto her cousin Muriel’s offer. They were closer than Innogen was to most of her extended family, and still called each other from time to time. All Innogen had done was mention summer holidays approaching and looking for something to fill Julian’s days to keep both of them from going mad, and Muriel suggested visiting for a while. Innogen had done her best to not sound too delighted at the offer, and even gave herself several moments to consider before holding her voice steady and saying it sounded very pleasant and she’d make sure Julian brought his own toothbrush.

The next night at dinner, after Julian passed her the basket of rolls, she announced, “We’re going to see our cousins in Lebanon this summer.”

She’d steeled herself for a fight, even for a meltdown where he’d turn his anger inside, and she almost didn’t know what to do with herself when it didn’t come. Instead, he nodded and asked, “When are we going and for how long?”

“Oh. Well, at least four days, possibly up to twelve if all our schedules allow, it depends on how busy the agency is this summer and what her family is doing. It’ll be after school gets out for the summer, so we have a month and a half left for planning. Probably not _right_ after school gets out, but well within a week or so.”

Julian rested his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand and looked off out the window, a mimicked posture he could have gotten from anyone or anywhere, the expression on his face the one he wore when he wanted to give the illusion of having to make a decision when he’d already decided long ago. Then he dropped his hand and said, “Will we go swimming?”

“I’m not sure. We’ll have to find out what there is to do. I was going to call Muriel tomorrow, would you like to join me when I do?”

“Yes, I think I would, please.” Then, as an afterthought, “How am I related to her?”

“She’s my cousin, which makes her your first cousin once removed.”

“How is she your cousin?”

“How is she – she’s my cousin because our parents were siblings. My mother, her father, they were brother and sister.” She knew it wasn’t an existentialist piece of philosophy wondering why Muriel as a person was here on Earth, that he was trying to figure out the family tree to plot it out in his head, and there were better ways he could have asked. Innogen knew she’d have to talk to Siobhan about that soon.

The other things the two of them talked about were solid enough, going by how he stayed calm and polite on the call, even making eye contact as appropriate for the conversation. He looked away when Muriel and Innogen weren’t speaking to him, but went right back to it when they were, which was a vast improvement over how he’d been just a year or so earlier – as though someone not being in the same room as him excused him from meeting their eyes. Muriel didn’t seem to think anything of it and answered his questions about how close Rayak was to the Mediterranean Sea and whether they might swim in it by explaining nowhere in Lebanon was more than two hours from the ocean. From the way he lit up at that, Innogen knew at least one day’s full itinerary. The rest could be figured out once they knew how long they’d have there and what Muriel’s family had planned.

Getting leave from work was only part of the preparation. She tried not to be too obvious about it, asking Julian if he’d looked up Rayak on any databases or done any research into what he wanted to do when they were there, but she got very little beyond swimming in the Mediterranean, and that he was genuinely looking forward to the holiday.

“I think it’s because I told him flat-out we were going. No bargaining, no arguments, just this is what we’re doing this summer.”

Siobhan finished polishing her glasses and pushed them back up her nose. “Given how Julian’s been progressing, I think I need to agree with that.” Before the end-of-the-year wrap-up meeting had begun, she’d made them tea – made it out of a pot, only replicating the boiling water – and they’d warmed their hands and talked about nothing of consequence before they’d begun talking about Julian. How he’d developed and improved over the past year in order to plan out what goals they’d build for the upcoming one. 

“We didn’t have anything scheduled for summer yet, either, so maybe that helped too. I’ve got him for more tennis and swimming lessons when we get back, not that he needs swimming lessons, really, except to help him sleep at night when he’s not doing the tennis –”

“It’s still helpful.”

“Exactly, that. I’d think that’d be the case for most any child. Sometimes I think they’d do well to advertise those classes to parents that way, help your child sleep better, and if anyone asks that’s how I’d pitch them. But that’s not why I’m here.”

“Innogen, we’ve finished with most everything you came in to discuss. We’re free to talk about advertising campaigns for a while, if you want to have a turn to talk about your job.”

“No, it’s fine. Really.” She pushed the mug away on the desk, turned it so the handle ran parallel to the nearest edge and leaned away. “Good news about Julian is…I like getting it. I know that must sound silly, or reductive, but I – there are some days I think bad news would be good, too, because any news about Julian is worth sharing, but good news is – you know how important good news is.”

“I do.” She smiled, very gently. “And speaking of good news, I have…it’s a delicate question that might lead to good news. I suppose you can say it’s an offer, and if you want to say no, then that’s perfectly fine.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I’ve been putting together some pieces for publication. Articles, papers. About my patients and their therapies, what’s worked for them, what hasn’t been successful. Largely what’s been effective. I’d like your permission to discuss Julian.”

“I – excuse me?”

“He’d be referred to by a pseudonym, of course. There wouldn’t be anything to break his anonymity. But I’d like to use him as a subject instead of a data point, if possible. It’s hard to find good subjects for some of what –”

“You want to use him because everything’s gone so well for him?” Siobhan hesitated before nodding. “Well, I’d love to say yes right away, but since this is about Julian, we’d have to ask him what he’d like.”

“You’re his legal guardian, though,” she said, confused.

“Yes, but for this sort of thing I’d really rather get his permission first. I’m saying yes if Julian does.”

It didn’t surprise Innogen when he agreed, wholeheartedly, just sent a warmth to her face.

When the day to go on holiday came, the ferry ride from London to Beirut took half of it, with most of the morning spent waiting for the ferry’s arrival and keeping Julian occupied during the wait. He did well at staying calm and quiet until it was time to board, when he practically tore her arm out of its socket and then just tore away from her to try to be the first person who claimed a seat. Innogen followed him to the ferry’s upper level, where he’d settled into a window seat and proceeded to fixedly stare out at the visible part of the ferry port. So she settled in next to him. He didn’t even look away from the window when she handed him his lunch; he just reached out a hand and ate the sandwich wrap while he watched Europe sweep along underneath them.

Signs in half a dozen Human languages and four alien ones greeted them along with everyone else departing the ferry, _WELCOME TO BEIRUT._ Muriel was waiting for them in the port with her four children, a handmade sign held up proudly by her younger son Seth and only daughter Rebekah, _welcome Innogen &Julian._ They were all smiling, some eagerly and some shyly, everyone dressed so much nicer than her and Julian in full skirts and fine shirts instead of travel clothes, and Innogen set the suitcases aside to give Muriel a good and proper hug. 

“It’s been too long for this,” she said.

“Way too long for this,” Muriel chuckled. “Everyone’s so happy to meet you all. And so this is Julian in the flesh, hello. You wanna give your cousin Muriel a hug? I’d love to give you a hug, whatcha say?” 

Julian looked away before meeting her eyes, very deliberately, to answer, “I would, thank you.”

“Oh, so polite.” She barely had to bend down to wrap her arms around Julian. After a moment’s hesitation, he did the same for her, but didn’t do so for any of Muriel’s children when she introduced all of them to each other one at a time, polite nods standing in for bodily contact. Under the circumstances Innogen felt no one could be blamed for not reaching out to touch anyone else. Julian barely spoke to them over the comm, they might as well all be meeting for the first time as strangers who’d never known the other existed until she and Julian stepped off the ferry. Avi was twelve, Seth, eleven, Rebekah, eight, and Gershon, six. Everyone made eye contact with everyone else, and Julian smiled politely when he knew he was supposed to.

“I’ve got the car parked outside, let’s go before the shade disappears.”

Muriel’s sons ensconced Julian and led him away from the women of the group. From what Innogen could hear from a couple of meters behind them while speaking to their mother, they were taking his social awkwardness in stride. Maybe they thought of it as part of Julian being an exotic English import, and Innogen hoped the novelty of his accent and vocabulary both lasted long enough for them to get comfortable with each other. Rebekah was happy to walk hand in hand with Muriel, sometimes sneaking a glance at Innogen, staying quiet as her mother and aunt spoke about grown-up things. True to her promise, Muriel’s car was parked in the shade of a tree planted at the edge of the parking lot, and the sun was high enough the shade would be gone in less than an hour.

“Who sits in front?” Seth called out.

“Whose turn is it?” Muriel said.

“I thought it was going to be mine, but Julian’s here.”

“Then let’s ask him if he wants. Julian, do you want to ride in front?”

He didn’t answer; he was staring at the front seat, silent, in the sort of stillness he got when he had to process a great deal of new information on the fly, without any preparation. Innogen sighed, then left Muriel to load their suitcases alone, gently moving Gershon aside to stand next to Julian. He didn’t look up at her when she said his name. “If you don’t want to ride in front, then you won’t have to. But if you want to, then you can.”

Gershon said, “If he doesn’t want it then –”

“No, I want it,” Julian cut in quickly, still looking through the window at the coveted front seat.

“You’re all right with riding in front?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I am.”

“Good. Then it’s yours for this ride. Muriel, do we add Julian into the front seat rotation?”

“While he’s here, I think so. What does everyone else think?” Everyone else agreed and said so at the same time, a general chorus of agreement of four voices together in a jumble of languages that Innogen couldn’t make much sense of but Muriel understood perfectly.

Any jealousy over Julian riding in the front evaporated when the truth came out that he’d never ridden in the front seat of a car before. After the bewildered laughter died down, which he hadn’t seemed to notice in favor of staring at Beirut go by, everyone realized he was serious.

“You’re making nonsense,” Avi said.

“No, really, it’s true. My – I never ride in the front of a car in London, Aunt Innogen doesn’t have a car. We have the trains.”

“We’ve got trains too. What if you need to move something?”

“We rent a van for that. But I’ve never ridden in one of them to ride in the front.”

As her brothers tried to make sense of the gaps in Julian’s vehicular experience, Rebekah asked her mother something in Arabic. She replied in the same language; from the tone it was clearly an admonishment, not an answer. Rebekah huffed, turned to Innogen, and in fluttered-by-way-of-Arabic with a faint touch of Estuary-accented English, asked her, “How are we related to each other?”

“Your mother and I are cousins, so you’re my cousin once removed.”

She nodded, looking away for a moment before turning back to Innogen. “Julian is my second cousin.”

“That’s right,” she replied.

“My mom and I have half our DNA together.” 

“We _share_ half our DNA,” her mother corrected her, calling out over Seth and Avi’s argument about city bikes.

“ _Share_ half our DNA,” she repeated.

“It’s right no matter which way it’s said,” Innogen said. “But share is better than have for this case.”

“So then Julian and I… we…he and I share three dot one two five percent of our DNA.”

Innogen blinked at her eight-year-old cousin once removed. “Is that right?”

“Fifty to twenty five to twelve dot five to six dot two-five to three dot one two five,” she explained, shrugging. “And move it over to where it goes.”

“Well done.”

“Thank you.”

The rest of the drive was largely dominated by Muriel’s travelogue tailored for Innogen and Julian; while she pointed out landmarks and spoke about new housing developments going up near the edge of the city, her children occupied themselves with handheld games and arguing quietly among each other. As Muriel drove on through the dry expanses between Beirut and Rayak, Julian rolled down his window to look up at the sky and seemingly ignore her. Innogen was on the opposite side of the vehicle and couldn’t see what he was looking at, but her guess was a raptor circling far above.

She found out what it was when they reached Muriel’s home, a pale two-storey house gently set into the sloping hillside. Julian had collected his backpack and Innogen was about to take his hand to lead him through a new, unfamiliar place when he said, “The sky’s different here.”

“What?” Seth turned to squint at him. “The sky’s the same all over the planet, what’s –”

“No, he’s right,” Innogen said, looking upwards. “We’re closer to the equator than in London, so it’s a different intensity of light. It’s a different colour there than what we have here.”

“You can tell that?” Muriel asked.

“I work in graphic design. I’d _better_ be able to tell that.” She took her and Julian’s suitcases. “You have a good eye for colour, Julian.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Innogen set their luggage down just inside, and as soon as it touched the floor, turned to Muriel and asked, “Before we keep on going, do you think you’d give us a tour of the house?”

“Now, right now? Sure, absolutely.” Julian was already peering down the nearest hallway without even taking off his backpack; better to give a reason, however flimsy, to explore the place and let him learn what was permitted and what was off-limits before finding out by accident. Gershon insisted they see his room first, and Julian let his backpack drop to the floor before they were off.

Her own house could have easily fit inside Muriel’s at least twice over, and that wasn’t even taking into account both the front and back yards – most of them were given over to gardening, but the back yard’s patio with its table and chairs for outdoor dining was perfectly recognizable. The raised beds almost made her think of doing something more with her own yard than ivy and grass and a few potted plants for herbal infusions, but as soon as Muriel explained precisely what composting was and how it happened, she knew she had better things to focus her time on.

“And you eat everything you grow out here?”

“Some of it. Most of it’s just to look nice out here or in the house, you know, pick a few flowers to brighten up the table. Outside of the beds it’s all natives, which helps keep it more low-maintenance.” She gently lifted a pink-and-white-striped aubergine hanging heavy on its vine and smiled. “This, we’ll be eating for dinner.”

“You’re really going to _cook_ for us? Muriel, you don’t need to trouble –”

“Come on, Innogen, don’t be so surprised, plenty of people cook. Maybe not people in London, sure, but when you’ve got space to garden and a kitchen to cook in? When you’ve got both of those and relatives coming over? Yeah, you cook.”

“I never would.”

“And how’s that?”

“Aunt Innogen’s house doesn’t have a kitchen.” At Julian’s answer, all of Muriel’s children stopped what they were doing to stare at their British relatives, all perfectly timed the way only siblings could.

“Then how do you _eat_?” Rebekah asked, shocked.

“Out of the replicator,” Julian replied.

“All the time?”

“Most of it.”

“Wow,” Gershon said.

It wasn’t a surprise Muriel’s kitchen was up next, and maybe as a bit of preening on her part, she assembled an afternoon snack for all the children by hand, using ingredients from one of the refrigerators. “Innogen, do you want anything? We’re not turning the replicators off for Shabbat just yet, in case you want something I don’t have around.”

“I’m fine. Well, I’d like some tea, if that’s all right.”

“Handmade or out of the replicator?”

“Handmade, but only if it’s not a problem.” 

“It’s fine, I’ll make some for myself too. Julian, will you want some?”

“No, thank you.” He was staring down at the bowl of yogurt mixed with diced fruit, honey, and some mint Muriel had picked just a few minutes ago that also made its way into the tea. She replicated the boiling water, which Innogen couldn’t fault her on, since all the leaves she brewed had originally come out of the dirt.

All seven of them were seated around a small island in the middle of the room, and while it was a tight fit, it didn’t feel particularly cramped. The kitchen room was about the same size as Innogen’s front room, and felt smaller not because of all the occupants but thanks to the strange doubling effect of two ovens, two sinks, two refrigerators, even two replicators. Innogen had barely any idea of what to do with one of everything, let alone two, but even with how small the room felt, she could admire how sleek and well put-together it all was, especially for a space Muriel used just as much as Innogen used her study – in fact, just leaning on the longest countertop rolling her tea between her hands, Innogen could see Muriel could easily reach everything she needed, whether it’d be for a milk or a meat meal.

She could also see her nephew not so much hesitating as intently studying his yogurt.

“Julian? If you don’t like it, that’s all right, just take a taste –”

“Please let me take a moment.” He kept looking intently at the contents of the bowl in front of him, at his cousins happily eating what was in theirs, and back to his own. Then he squared his shoulders and took as decisive a bite of yogurt as Innogen thought was possible – Julian could eat very decisively, when he wanted. He swallowed, and looked down to take in what he’d just eaten with a strange, bewildered expression on his face. Before she could tell him how to proceed if he didn’t want to eat the rest of it, Julian started on the rest of the yogurt at his typical eating pace and finished his bowl before everyone else was even close to being done with theirs.

Innogen had to hold herself back from praising him for eating well. She still did, sometimes, even now, but in someone else’s home she didn’t want to have to explain why something that seemed so simple as eating deserved any praise at all.

“Oh, so you liked it?” Muriel asked, almost teasing.

“Very much, yes,” he answered sincerely. “Thank you.”

“Don’t you eat yogurt in London?” Seth asked, about three bites away from being done with his portion.

“Well, we don’t have a fridge for either milk or meat, so without a fridge we can’t keep yogurt like this. What comes out of the replicator doesn’t taste anything like what this does, I never like it, it’s so sweet and bland but this is – it’s thick, it’s nice – Aunt Innogen, could we get a refrigerator in the kitchen?”

“I suppose. I’ll have to call a depot to see about getting one delivered and installed. It might be some time, but we could.”

“Oh, wonderful. Wonderful.”

“It’s half – okay, not half, but one of the big reasons I keep a kitchen instead of just replicators, the day I get yogurt out of a replicator’s the day I stop going to shul, you know?” Muriel laughed at her joke. “I’m sure you can find good yogurt in London. You have cows in England, right? Sheep? I know you got sheep up there.”

“We’ve even got goats. We can get proper yogurt with all the right bacteria, I’m sure of it. But I’ve never tried looking for it, and even if I find some I wouldn’t have a place to keep it. We’d have to eat it all then and there.”

“There are worse fates,” Rebekah said solemnly, depositing her empty bowl into the milk-side’s sink.

“I suppose so.” Innogen tried not to laugh at how serious she sounded, an eight-year-old intoning advice like she had all the weight of the world behind her words.

The rest of the house tour was women only, since Rebekah decided her grown-up cousin would be more fun to spend time with than all the boys. Her brothers had invited Julian to play outside with them, some game certain to transcend language barriers and communication difficulties, and Julian seemed happy enough at the invitation there didn’t seem to be any problems. With happy kids kicking a ball around, little things like autism didn’t matter.

If Gershon and Avi and Seth were around to narrate the contents of their bedrooms and perhaps demonstrate some of the functions of their newer toys, the rest of the tour might have lasted a good deal longer. Instead, their rooms were simply pointed out without even being glanced at, with Rebekah’s room as the last stop. She’d done her best to downplay just how much she wanted Innogen to see everything her room had to offer, and Muriel played along quite kindly, presumably to take a little time to herself to get dinner going. Innogen had no real idea how long it might take, and was happy to not be involved in any way except the final eating of it. So she sat on the floor, noticed how the walls and doors were decorated in the usual blue-and-brown girl’s colour scheme, and nodded politely as Rebekah told her about the books on the shelves in languages Innogen couldn’t read, lined up the population of her basket of toy farm animals and arranged them all on the rug to make the appropriate noises for each species, and then as the final grace, detailed the family history and lineage of all the occupants of her dollhouse.

“It belonged to my uncle when he was a kid. And he gave it to Mom for Avi who didn’t really want it, but I did, so I asked Avi, and he gave it to me.”

“Very nice.”

“He didn’t play with it, he’d just leave it on the shelf. I like to take it down, and take everyone out and put them back, it’s fun to get everything arranged all right. All nice? Is that the right English?”

“All right would be what you’d say.”

“Good. Get it all right. See? Everyone’s got the place to go.” Rebekah had a name and story and history for every dollhouse occupant, from the parents and children to the grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and even the pets. Starting with the attic and moving down through the house, whether it was a person or animal she’d explain everything about one of the individual occupants with a novelist’s attention to detail, let Innogen look at it, then put it right back where it’d been before moving onto the next.

Innogen took one of the younger sons as Rebekah narrated his mother’s duties in her office and turned the little figurine over in her hands, rotating his arm in the socket. “You spent a lot of time on this,” she said admirably, placing him on the couch in the living room.

“What’d are you doing _no_!”

Startling, Innogen snapped around to look at Rebekah, who shook as she snatched up the doll from the couch, shuddered as she smoothed out his legs and hair.

“I’m– Rebekah, if I just –”

“He doesn’t go there.” She didn’t look at Innogen. “He goes into his room.” And back he went to where he’d been when Innogen had plucked him out of his little life.

“But…” Rebekah had wanted to show this to her. There had to be some way for her to interact with Rebekah’s dollhouse beyond captive audience. “What if he wants to go and read in the living room?”

“Then he goes and reads in the living room, but his room is where he _goes_.”

“Where he goes. Right. I see.” Innogen nodded and let Rebekah sit for a moment before she said, “And his grandmother? The one in the kitchen? You were just telling me about her.”

Going back to the stories she’d been telling helped her get back to the calm, happy little girl she’d been the rest of the day, not the one who’d shrieked and shouted and made a fuss over something as simple as a doll being put into the wrong room. Rebekah finished up the little tour and put the dollhouse back onto its shelf, and rather than spend a moment not doing much of anything while at a loss for better ideas, Innogen asked her to show her some of her favorite pictures in the large natural photography book. Looking at pictures of seagulls and geese meant not having to bother with language barriers; Innogen asked her to read her the names out loud anyway. Rebekah tripped over her words, but from excitement and having to translate them, not because she had much trouble getting her mouth to cooperate with her mind.

When they came out of her room, the afternoon was late enough Muriel had begun dinner and the family cat had finished his nap and was getting his required pettings from Gershon. Innogen could see Seth and Ari were playing well with Julian, playing some sort of older-boys-only ball game that looked like a strange variant between cricket and football. She couldn’t tell what the rules were, or if there were any, and only hoped Julian was enjoying himself.

Apparently he’d done well enough they went right back to playing it after dinner, with Rebekah and Gershon coming along and Muriel’s husband Sol hosting an adult gathering in his study. Dinner had covered the basics of her and Julian’s lives as well as their children’s, where Innogen described her current work projects as best she could before she had to stop and take twenty minutes to explain the aesthetics of kerning, how it wasn’t just the shapes of the letters, that the spaces around and between were just as important, imploring them to think of the signs in the ferryport and how the letters had looked. Seth and Avi were taking Hebrew lessons for their Torah readings, not because they wanted to visit Israel as Julian asked, with Seth remarking that reading the Torah to visit Israel would be like reading Shakespeare to visit England. Gershon held a vague hope to work outside somewhere instead of in an office like his father, while Rebekah had a highly detailed plan for how she’d become an oceanographic researcher.

In contrast, the adults-only time was set aside to discuss what the next eight days might entail.

“You’ll want time to explore the art scene we’ve got here alone. Trust me, go alone.”

“I’m sure we can make it a family outing.”

“No, you really need it to just be you,” Sol said. “We can easily take Julian alone for a day. Along, sorry. We’ll take him along for a day, and you can take that day to see the arts. Make it Wednesday. There’s the craft fair, you’ll love the weavings – you know weavings, right? On the looms?”

“I know weavings, yes.”

“You’ll love those. The wool’s all from around here. The dyes, too. And there’s a couple of small little galleries, but you know what you actually need to do? Take the whole day and see the galleries in Beirut. There’s a bus line that’ll take you into downtown, then from there it’s a little walk, the good ones are all near each other anyway. Find something to take home with you, maybe a nice landscape painting. A set of bowls.”

“Maybe. I’ll have to see what looks nice – this would be all of Wednesday? Morning to night?”

“Breakfast to dinner,” Muriel confirmed.

“You’re sure you’ll be able to handle yourselves?”

“Of course we can. What’s one more kid?”

“Julian isn’t exactly just one more child.”

“Innogen, we’ll be all right with him for a day.” Sol put down his tea and smiled warmly. “We’ve got five days to get to know him, and five days to get him prepared for it, too.”

“I don’t know. Five days might not be enough. He still sometimes gets into these, these _moods_ , I guess you might say if you’re trying to be polite about it…”

“Look, don’t keep giving worry to it. If he’s going to be as much a problem as you say he is, and from what we’ve seen I don’t think he’s gonna be, we’ll know if we gotta get you to come along and if you can’t spare yourself a day. We’ve got time for that.”

“That’s fair. I suppose…all right. Let’s take five days and see what happens in the meantime.”

“Will you want to come to services on Saturday with us?” Sol asked, pouring her another cup of tea.

“Do you mean me alone, or me and Julian?”

“Both of you.”

“Then I’ll wait to answer until we ask him tomorrow morning,” she said, and took a long, deliberate sip.

Not long after that, they cleared out the study, as time zone shift or no time zone shift it was coming on Julian’s bedtime. Instead of anyone sharing their bedroom while Julian and Innogen were over, Julian was getting Sol’s study all to himself, a room he’d given up willingly much in the way Innogen had long ago given up her own guest bedroom, with Innogen on the fold-out couch in the living room. It was a small, private little room, messier than Innogen’s study and perfect for Julian to sleep in. He’d accepted the suggestion readily when Muriel proposed it during dinner. But he might have simply wanted to get back to the cricket-football game, because he’d accepted it sight unseen.

Innogen was preparing her bed when Julian approached her and said he wanted to trade rooms.

“This is what we agreed to, Julian. You know that keeping your agreements is important?”

“Yes, I do.” He was quiet, and then said again, “I want to trade rooms.”

“Why?” Innogen grunted and let the bed down gently before turning around to face him. “Do you think it’s going to be cramped in the study? You want more room to spread out what you brought?”

“No, it’s…it’s that…” He shook his head, not precisely disagreeing, working something unpleasant around in his mouth.

“Are you worried it’s going to be too bright to sleep in there? It’s going to be a lot brighter out here, the blinds aren’t as thick out here as they are there.”

“It isn’t that.” More of that unpleasant taste.

“Then what is it, Julian?” He rubbed his hands against his face, not quite crying. But he was doing just about everything but the tears and the wailing. She crouched down in front of him and put her hand on his shoulder, to remind him she was there. “Can you tell me, or do you need to show me?”

He shook his head and pulled a long, thin sound from his throat. “I can tell you.” She waited for him to get the words in his head into the right order to put into his mouth, and he looked away from her like he was in pain. “There are masks in there.”

“Masks?” 

He nodded. 

“Sol’s masks?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice small in fear.

Sol had three masks in his study, all of them up on a high shelf next to some travel photography books she’d been surprised to recognize. He’d been delighted to hear her agency had been proud to work on those, years before she’d been hired. As he’d told her, those books had inspired him to go on many journeys, including the one where he’d gotten the masks. She’d looked at the books first, wondering how well they’d been translated, then asked his permission to take down the masks. They were far sturdier than she’d first thought, all handmade, lovely wooden faces with crowns of cowrie shells, orange and red paints highlighting various features, mouths full of smiling teeth. There was nothing about them that could – 

No. That didn’t matter. It didn’t matter _why_ they scared Julian, that part didn’t matter at all, because _they were scaring Julian_. Julian was the part that mattered.

“You’ll sleep out here, then, and I’ll take the study.” And like that, all his fear left, all at once. “Let’s get this bed made and get your things, all right?”

“All right,” he answered, very quiet. Innogen gave him the pillows to stuff into their cases, and he helped her tuck in the sheets and blankets from the opposite side of the bed to do it in half the time. At the door of Sol’s study, his suitcase and backpack were waiting just outside in the hallway, not even making it through the door. Innogen guessed he’d come inside to look around, seen the masks, and only stopped long enough to close the door behind him before he went to get her.

Now, with the door wide open so Innogen could get her luggage inside, he wasn’t even looking through the door and was doing his best to stand to the side of it, past where he’d be in their line of sight. She wanted to sigh, or cry, or laugh, and settled on giving him a good-night kiss and reminding him to shower before bed, which seemed enough of a reminder of their usual nightly routine he went to do just that.

Innogen knew taking the masks down and putting them away would only help so much; Julian would need to know exactly where they’d been hidden, because otherwise they could be anywhere, and then he’d have to deal with his fear once-removed, not gone. Even hiding them under a sheet or blanket would be just another stopgap measure. There were some battles Innogen knew she could fight and win, and there were some that weren’t worth fighting at all. She sat down on the floor, in the space cleared out for the air mattress and sleeping bag, a space more to the scale of a ten-year-old boy than an adult woman, and stared at the masks’ frozen smiles glistening in the dark. They’d been so lovely in her hands in the light. She could see why Sol loved them so much, and why Julian didn’t share any of it.

It'd be all right.


	14. When I Fall

When Julian came into the kitchen the next morning and said, “Good morning, Aunt Innogen,” she replied in kind and asked him how well he’d slept on the couch.

“I slept well. It’s fun to have such a big bed.”

“I thought you had the couch,” Muriel said.

“We decided to switch last night. It isn’t a problem, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Good.” And that was the end of it. She couldn’t find a way to put it into words why the masks bothered Julian, and was glad she didn’t have to come up with something for someone else. Sol didn’t asks Julian at any point during breakfast, either. Instead, over juice and eggs, he asked Julian how he felt about going to services that weekend.

“You don’t have to go,” Innogen said. “Not if you don’t want to. We’ll just spend the morning here, maybe go for a little walk while they’re in shul.”

“All right.” He took another drink. “I think I’d like to.”

“You’re certain?”

“I think so, Aunt Innogen. Yes.”

“There’s our answer, Sol. So when do we need to be up and what do we need to wear?”

“Just a bit before the usual time,” Rebekah interrupted. “And nice clothes, formal. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it needs to be nice and clean. I bet you could borrow from Seth and Muriel if you had to.”

“We might,” Innogen said, trying not to smile at how she sounded so much older than her age again. “If it comes to that.”

“Julian, don’t worry. I’ll give you a walk through everything. We won’t sit together, but I’ll be sure, I’ll let you know what everything’s going to be and when it’ll be happening. We can wave to each other.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Now that that’s all settled,” Muriel patted her daughter’s shoulder and joined them with her coffee, “how’s about we get to today first?”

“Isn’t today Qaraoun?” Seth asked.

“It could be. We’ve got time to drive there, make a day of it.”

“Qaraoun?” Innogen asked.

“It’s a reservoir a bit north of here. Hiking trails, a little nature museum, lots of birds. It’s a nice way for a Thursday to go. How does that sound?”

“I’d say it sounds quite nice. Julian, what do you think?”

“How would we be getting there?”

“We’d drive. Take the car. Be a little squished if Sol’s coming with us, which he might.”

“I’d like to.”

“Be a bit squished, like I said. But we’d be there in maybe an hour.”

Julian nodded. “When are we going to be eating lunch?”

“Sometime in the afternoon, I guess.”

“And when will that be?”

“I’m not sure. After noon, maybe around one? It’ll be –”

“So when is it going to be?”

“Look, I’m not sure. We don’t have a precise schedule, all I can do is guess.”

“Then can you make a guess, please?” His voice was getting tight, which wasn’t a good sign.

“Julian.” Innogen put her hand over his where he’d laid it on the table. “She means it when she says she doesn’t know. If it takes us an hour to get there, and we leave soon, we can have lunch sometime between noon and two o’clock. But definitely before two o’clock. That’s the best anyone can say right now. Is between noon and two all right for you?”

He pulled his hand away. Innogen only had a moment to worry before he looked her in the eye. “Yes, Aunt Innogen, it is.”

“Good. We’re bringing lunch with us, right?”

“The museum’s small enough they’ve got replicators for staff only,” Sol told them.

“There we go, Julian. We’ll bring lunch with us and eat sometime after we get there. What do you want for yours?”

He thought a moment, then without looking up from the table, he asked, “Muriel, what can I have?”

Much later, after running through the options and finally settling on something, when Sol and Muriel were packing up everyone’s lunches, Innogen felt obligated to apologize to them on Julian’s behalf. “He gets – we have a very specific schedule back home, and it’s difficult for him to adjust when things move off of it. Usually we plan things out in advance, but sometimes, he can’t get it into his head right away. I’m sorry he made such a fuss at you.”

“It’s no problem, trust me,” Muriel shrugged. “Rebekah can get the same way.”

“She.” Innogen felt like she was speaking from the bottom of a deep well when she said, “She does, does she.”

“Sometimes, yeah. You all right?” Sol asked.

“Oh, yes. Fine. Quite fine.” After they’d settled the lunch issue, and figured out the seating arrangements for the drive, Rebekah was downright boisterous, describing the Qaraoun Reservoir to her new favorite cousins, all the very particular and special things they might do when they got there. She was animated and lively, throwing her hands out into the air to show just how long they’d have to walk on certain trails or the size of some of the migratory birds, clearly overjoyed to have someone new to speak to about these things – and for all her tight-beam enthusiasm and joy, she’d never quite managed to meet Innogen’s eyes straight on for more than just a moment.

It was easy to see why she loved it so when they arrived; there was nothing like it in England, not with the clean heat and such an intense blue summer sky. In the little museum, Rebekah took over as Julian’s private docent, lecturing him on everything as she led him to her favorite of the little holo-dioramas. Out by the reservoir itself, everyone picking their way along the paths, she whispered a reminder to herself Innogen only managed to hear because they were both kneeling at the ground, and then she pointed at what it’d been she’d wanted to show her.

It’d been Siobhan’s lessons and tutelage and Innogen’s constant repetition of those that taught Julian how to point. She’d shown him a number of pictures, photographs and illustrations and paintings, and demonstrated the gesture for him to copy. When Innogen saw him spontaneously repeating the gesture to show her and that woman with the dog the pigeon on the rooftop that long-ago day in London, how he’d held his hand just as one of the men did in one of the illustrations, she’d had to fight back tears at the sight of it.

Without quite meaning to but never stopping herself from doing so, she began to pay special attention to Rebekah, and small patterns began to bring themselves to light. When she opened a door with one hand, she’d turn around and close it with the other, just as she’d scratch one side of her neck after the other, mirroring the action on both halves of the bilateral divide. If she looked someone in the eye, she’d very often look away a moment later, as though she had to rest – as though there was only so much of it she could handle at any one moment.

Even with Sol along to increase the ratio of parents to children, she received the bulk of their attention. It wasn’t by intention or design, but simply how it happened. Rebekah would speak out of turn and be quietly reminded to wait, or she’d be asked to still herself and not fidget, or to stop and slow down to make sure all her words were understood. None of her brothers received anywhere near the same amount of social guidance.

Innogen always made sure to let Julian know what he needed to do in any particular situation, and afterward she tried to talk to him about what had gone well and what he might do better the next time. She knew he hated it as much as she did, but she knew they had to do it just the same. When Rebekah’s father or mother took her aside or admonished her to correct her behavior, she reacted in much the same ways: annoyed, sulking, following the rules as they were explained without any enthusiasm but a strange awareness this was for the best.

On Friday afternoon, as the household readied itself for the Sabbath, Sol and Muriel first made sure Innogen and Julian would both be fine eating meat from an animal that had been alive at one point, and when they were satisfied with that, Sol asked for permission to give Julian a blessing. 

“A blessing?”

“Do you bless him? I know you’re not his mother, but you’re the one who takes care of him. It’s not quite Talmudic, but I’d think it’d be permissible. Children should be blessed. I’m not even his uncle, but while he’s here?” He tilted his hand side-to-side, balancing the cosmic scales one way and then another.

“I didn’t even know children _could_ be blessed.” He smiled at her, very generously. “But I think it’s a grand idea, and if you want to give Julian a blessing, ask him.”

“And would you like to light the candles with me and Rebekah?” Muriel asked.

“I – yes, I think I would, but God, it’s been years since I even heard, I wouldn’t –”

“It’s fine. Just bring the light to your face, and murmur along with us. We’ll say it for you. If you want to.”

“I do, but…no. Yes, I would like to. I will.”

It wasn’t until she saw Rebekah bringing the light to her face, and how serious and serene her face was, that Innogen saw it wasn’t an obligation to welcome the Sabbath Bride, but an honor and a duty all in one. She pulled the light to her face as well, and with her hands over her eyes, the first words of the blessing, the first words of nearly every blessing, were easy enough to remember – and then, in what felt like nearly a miracle, the rest of the words came running out of her mouth without Innogen stopping to think about what the next one was, like running across a rushing river and jumping from rock to rock without looking back. Or falling, and landing, and opening her eyes to see the light of the candles when the blessing was over, said perfectly, and it was now the Sabbath. 

She sat, and watched Sol make his way around the table, laying his hands on his children with one prayer for his sons and another for his daughter. He didn’t give one to Julian. She could tell from his face as he watched Sol that it’d pulled something in him, but she couldn’t say where, or how.

The next morning, after a cold breakfast and borrowing sets of appropriate clothes, they headed off to shul. Innogen had thought they might drive there, as Muriel had pointed it out on the drive to Qaraoun, but instead they went on foot. It was still early enough for a bit of night chill to cling to the streets, whispering from the alleyways, and as much as Innogen had wanted a hot cup of something that morning instead of something cold, never mind if it was caffeinated or not, she found herself moving gently in time with everyone else as the town woke up around them. As they made their way to the shul, they caught up with another family that lived closer than they did, all of Aryeh and Jeremiah’s children; friends of Muriel’s own, though the three of them clearly had their favorites – everyone loved Seth, only the youngest were pleased to see Gershon, and everyone held a little back from Rebekah.

Innogen let Julian walk on ahead with Seth and his friends, slowed down to match Rebekah’s pace, and took her hand in her own.

“Are you doing all right?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“You didn’t seem so happy to see everyone.”

“It’s okay.”

“Aren’t they your friends?” Rebekah shrugged. Innogen nodded, and waited until they’d crossed the street to pitch her voice gently, “Do you not have an easy time making friends?”

“Not really.”

“Do you have trouble talking to people? Figuring out what to say to them?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a hard time making friends sometimes, too.”

“You do?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes I really want to get people to like me, and I can get very – pushy, I suppose, to make sure of that, so I try not to be so forward, be a little more – reserved. It works sometimes. But I can’t always tell. So I know how it is to have trouble being friends with people.”

Rebekah swung their hands together. “It’s not so bad. I got friends at school now.”

“That’s nice, it’s always nice to have friends at school. I made most of my friends there.” Everyone else up ahead of them was talking, and she caught sight of Julian not looking at the other boys, but definitely talking to them and having what looked like a very pleasant time. Rebekah kept swinging their hands, and Innogen let her do so until they got to the shul, where she followed her and Muriel upstairs to the women’s seating. Even with a translated siddur and Rebekah’s detailed lessons, she wasn’t exactly certain of what she was supposed to do, but she’d rather worry about that with people she knew close by instead of alone.

It was a fairly young synagogue, less than three centuries old, built following classical designs with women above and men below. She couldn’t read any of the siddurim in Arabic, and even if she recognized the alphabet she didn’t have enough Hebrew to daven in that language, but somehow it was comforting to not know quite what to do or say when everyone else also knew that, and could make an allowance for her.

Innogen took a siddur down from the bookshelf, and from her seat, peered over the edge to see if she could spot Julian. He was looking up and around for her, too, and when he saw her, grinned wide and happy. Then the rabbi took her place at the bema, and they both looked to her as she began.


	15. Hidden Sun

Sol was kind enough to give her a ride to the train station in the morning. It would have taken her about as much time to walk to as the shul had, but he was more than willing to do so, and she accepted it gladly.

It was closer in spirit to the trains that used to take her family to the seaside than to the London underground, which followed it being part of a small international system that connected the Western coast of the Mediterranean. But the sight of people on the platform waiting to get on with their daily commute, or just get on with their day, was so familiar Innogen almost forgot she wasn’t at home. She took a seat at a table by a window to watch the landscape slide by – much closer to hills and valleys she’d glimpsed before, from the road she could just see if she peered out the other side.

The announcements were in Arabic, the signs in Arabic, French, English, Hebrew, and Vulcan. She could understand the maps well enough without much help, and her guidebook that updated every hour on the hour said there weren’t any track changes or repairs scheduled for the day or any accidents on the news, and they’d get into Beirut on schedule.

Innogen was well absorbed in the book she’d brought, foolishly thinking she’d have a little time to read, when the train stopped at Zahle and another set of commuters got on. She didn’t think anything of them, glancing up to take them in, then did a double-take – a rude thing to do, the sort of thing any city dweller trained themselves out of doing, but this wasn’t a city, and they hadn’t noticed for her to need to apologize for noticing them at all. You weren’t supposed to stare at aliens. But until Innogen saw the Bolian sit down and pull out a padd of her own, she realized she hadn’t seen an alien since arriving in Beirut.

The train picked up more passengers, still mostly Human but no longer nothing else, as they drew closer to the city. Innogen knew not everyone who worked in a city wanted to live there as well – no patience for the housing lottery, or a desire for some more breathing room, or any of a thousand other good reasons. But she couldn’t recall any aliens who’d made Earth their home that decided to live someplace other than a city. Cities were built for people of all kinds, but the rest of Earth was only fit for Humans. Even small towns like Muriel’s weren’t quite right.

Beirut itself didn’t have quite as many aliens as London, though it had enough to make her realize just what had been so subtly off about Rayak.

She walked through the galleries, took her lunch at a little café where everything was made by hand, and it felt all right to wait a little while. Taking Sol’s advice, she arranged for a painting to be shipped home to London; it would arrive a few days after she and Julian returned, and it felt all right to wait for that, too. Walking by the water, standing at the railing to look out at the beach and horizon, made her stop and wish she could hold her heart in her hands, to calm it for a moment. The salt-heavy wind played with her hair and she closed her eyes to feel it on her face, and simply place herself where she was. To place herself alone, as she hadn’t done for years. She was still tethered, but at this moment, the ocean in front of her and London far ahead, the rest of the solid world behind, she couldn’t quite feel it, only feel where it would have been. It hurt to press around the space, and she let herself leave it, let herself feel it as much as she could without trying to define precisely what it was she felt.

Julian had a good deal to tell her when she got back that night, late after dinner – she’d called ahead to let them know to begin without her, and though she didn’t say she’d been worried Julian might not have eaten without her present, she did let them know she’d been sorry to miss another of Muriel’s dinners. So over very grown-up tea served not in Sol’s study but the main living room, permitted to put off bedtime by nearly a full half-hour, he told her about their visit to the shochet that afternoon.

“Cousin Muriel needs chickens for Shabbat dinner, and since we’re going to be busy at the ocean tomorrow and she can’t go Friday she had to make it today. We had to go into the back to get them because she was picking them up early, and that meant the orders had to be shifted around, and it smelled _wet_ , I think that’s because she has to hose down the blood from the back where she does the killing.”

“Did you go into the back?”

“No, I just smelled it. And it didn’t smell bad, or alive. It just smelled _wet_. Her wife showed us around to the back when I asked if we could see the animals they had that were still alive, and I got the sheep to come to me.”

“Did you ask them nicely?”

Julian looked at her, puzzled. “No, I just called to them.”

She smiled. “Baa baa.”

“Aunt Innogen!” He sounded so offended she almost choked on her tea. “Sheep don’t really make that sound. It’s more of a _mmmhhhaaahhaaammmaa_.”

Innogen looked at Julian, surprised, then to Muriel and Sol, disbelieving. They smiled, and Muriel said, “That’s how he did it. Talked to them in their own language.”

“I didn’t know what I was saying,” Julian said, looking away. “But I guess I said it right.”

“Rebekah, too,” Sol said.

“Rebekah?”

“She was mmaahhha-ing right along with Julian.”

“They ate out of our hands,” Julian told her, smiling proudly. “Just like in the zoo.”

“But these weren’t zoo sheep. They were eating sheep,” Muriel said.

“I know. But they were still nice sheep.”

“Nice to pet, nice to eat,” Innogen said.

“I’d think so.”

“Come back for Pesach, find out then,” Muriel said. “We always get our lamb from her.”

“We might,” Innogen allowed. “It’s in April, right?”

“Usually. It’ll be then next year.”

“Then we might. We’ll see what happens.” At the moment, she felt it too much to plan more than a few months ahead, let alone nearly a year.

When she lay awake in Sol’s study that night, almost cramped and nearly cozy and unable to sleep, she turned her pillow over to the cool side and thought about the ocean on her face.

She got to see it again the next day, their last in Lebanon. Friday they’d see themselves back in London, taking the train into Beirut to spare anyone the trouble of driving them in when they could otherwise prepare for the Sabbath. Thursday was the day they finally got to Julian’s one request – he was so eager for it he didn’t even bother getting dressed in proper clothes that he’d only have to change out of later. 

Seth was still asleep enough to forget his mother’s request to accommodate their guests and said something to Julian in Arabic when he saw him already in his suit. A stern reminder from his father clearly included instructions to repeat himself in English, because he asked, “What kind of a swimming suit is that?”

“An English one,” Julian answered.

“You look like a surfboarder.”

“It’s what I wear to go swimming.”

“Even in a pool, inside?”

“No. This is a new suit I got for the ocean.”

“I like your new swimsuit, Julian,” Innogen said as she got her morning tea. “It looks very sharp.”

“Thank you, Aunt Innogen. Even if I know you’re just saying that.” He joined her at the table.

“It looks like a girl’s swimsuit,” Gershon said. “One of Rebekah’s.”

“Really? Why’s that, it covers so much?” Innogen asked. “Julian’s suit is designed for swimming in the ocean around England. It’s a lot colder there, you know, so it’s supposed to help keep him warm by covering up more skin. And now that we’re here, where he doesn’t need to be warm, he doesn’t need as much sunscreen as you’re going to.” The argument was effective enough no one thought to say anything more, and Innogen refused to comment on the fact that Rebekah also came to the breakfast table dressed for the ocean, and that her suit was remarkably like Julian’s, though his didn’t have a flexible knee-length swimming skirt, just knee-length swimming trousers. Both of them wore long-sleeved tops that went to their elbows, though Rebekah’s was pulled on over her head and Julian’s zipped up in the front. 

Lunch was replicated instead of assembled to save a few minutes’ work, with that time going to packing up the car. Innogen hadn’t ever seen anyone take going to the beach so seriously, not even her brother – when she thought about shovels and buckets, she imagined small, brightly-coloured objects, perhaps hand trowels, and almost did a double-take when she saw Avi carrying one of his father’s full-sized spades out from the garden.

It was one of the first things out of the car when they arrived, along with the blankets, baskets, and pails. Julian was fine with sunscreen as long as he could apply it himself, from his elbows to his hands and his knees to his feet, and didn’t even need any prompting for his face and the back of his neck. And once it was on, he took off to the water. Innogen watched him run, just like she had when she’d been his age and so eager to dive out into the cool arms of the welcoming ocean. But here it was the warm arms, as she found out – Julian already out and swimming, body-surfing rather poorly but with relentless enthusiasm, getting the wind knocked out of him with the bigger waves and rushing back out to do it again. She ducked her head and bobbed to the surface, took a breath and dove down just below where her feet had been, just to where it started to get cool. Down to the same part of the ocean that touched England.

Julian was there when she came up, and shook his hair out with a grin in a transparent ruse to make her laugh. She didn’t deny it to him.

From the beach, she watched him kneeling in the sand, helping all four of his cousins sculpt a rather elaborate, if unrefined, sand fortress that wouldn’t survive the incoming tide but promised to put up a fight. She’d almost stopped paying attention when she heard him shriek – him _and_ Rebekah, and she was on her feet when it caught up to her that it’d been a _happy_ shriek, and he was on his way to her as she was on his way to him with something cupped in his hands, Rebekah right behind him.

“What is it, Julian? What’s it you’ve got there?”

“Look, Aunt Innogen!” He opened his hands. “A sand crab!”

“A what?”

“Sand crab,” Rebekah repeated patiently, for the benefit of her sadly ignorant older cousin who didn’t even know what a sand crab was. “That’s their name. They’re not really crabs, but they’re called crabs. They eat plankton. This one’s big, so it’s a girl. Her face is in front, and they dig backwards. See? She’s trying to dig into Julian’s fingers, backwards.”

“She is. Can I hold her?” Julian passed the teardrop-shaped little grey creature to her, and she forced herself still as not to drop it when she tickled against her palm, trying to dig her way in between her index and middle fingers. “She’s very strong! Julian, where did you find her? We should put her back.”

“Over here. Where we were digging. Come on, I’ll show you.” He took her back to let the sand crab go, and Innogen watched, fascinated, as she dug her way back into the sand, and as the water came up over her, imagined her sticking her eyes up to get a good view. Innogen herself kept her eyes open and looking down as the wave crashed and flowed over her feet, and as the water moved back out to the sea, wondered what else was hidden beneath her. Another wave hit the beach and she dug her toes into the sand, watched the wave trail out on both sides, perfectly clear for just a moment, just long enough to see the sand move and dance before being pushed back up the beach again, and on and on, so it went, towards the horizon, to the edge of the world. To England and back again.

Everyone was playing well with the sand fortress, and Innogen made her way back to the adults-only blanket. Muriel had set up a few chairs, and was leaning one arm on the lunch cooler and enjoying her little moment of quiet. Sol was engrossed in his book, but was willing to put it away when Innogen said, “Can I ask the two of you something?”

“Sure,” Muriel said, not looking up. “What’s on your mind?”

“I’m – I’m not quite sure how to say this. I just – I’ve been – all right. Before I say anything else, thank you for having us, we both had and are still having what we in England would say is a positively lovely time and we’d be more than happy to come back again if you’ll have us. All right.” She ran her hand over her head, collecting a few loose strands of hair. “I’ve been – I don’t mean to pry, or impose. She’s your daughter. But I’ve been noticing that Rebekah, _about_ Rebekah, and she seems…she reminds me of Julian, in a lot of ways.”

“Are you –?”

“Do you think she’s autistic?” The words came out in a rush, in a wave, and there was no pulling them back.

She’d tried to figure out what Muriel and Sol might say to it, and had expected curiosity or confusion or even anger, but hadn’t anticipated laughter.

“No, of course not,” Muriel said.

“You don’t – you don’t think, not at all?”

“She couldn’t be,” Sol said.

“You’ve got to stop talking for autism, right? That’s how it works, that’s what Julian’s parents told us happened with Julian. It’s what happened to him, right? Well, Rebekah never stopped. She might’ve started late, but she didn’t _stop_ , so she can’t have autism.”

“It’s not – you don’t really say you have it, but, wait, when did she start?”

“Nearly thirty-two months,” Sold told her. “We were worried it was getting so late. She didn’t babble or try to imitate anything, she’d cry or laugh but she wouldn’t talk, she wouldn’t make sounds like that. And then one day, and I’m never going to forget this, Muriel wanted –”

“I needed her to come with me for some errands, I can’t remember the errands but I can remember her, I asked her to come with me, and she looked at me and she said, _I’m ready to go if you are_ , just like that, she started taking.”

“Just like that?”

Sol snapped his fingers. “She hasn’t stopped.”

“So she can’t have autism, right?”

“I…I really couldn’t say.” She cleared her throat. “I shouldn’t say. I’m sorry. She’s your daughter, I shouldn’t have imposed.”

“It’s all right, I’m not gonna blame you.” Muriel smiled. “You want some tea? I got a thermos of that, or lemonade if you like.”

“Save the lemonade for the kids. They don’t need more caffeine today.” That got a laugh out of both of them, and Innogen did her best to put on her best strong face and keep smiling throughout the day, until she was tired from swimming, sleepy from the sun, and nobody put up a fight when it was time to go so that they’d all be home by dinnertime. The ride back was quiet, and Julian only started being ready to talk again when he was in bed, curled up in the middle of the adult-sized mattress and stroking his bear’s ears.

“Did you have fun today?”

“I had a lot of fun today.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear that. My parents used to take me to the beach. We could go to the beaches back home, if you like. You have a swimsuit for it now, we could go later this summer, when it’s still warm enough to swim.”

“We could. It’d be nice to go back.” He rolled over and smiled up at Innogen. “I’ve missed going to the beach.”

“I never took you,” Innogen said, puzzled.

“No. Mum and Dad did.”

“They did?”

“They did, just a few times. I always liked it. I’m going to have to write to them about this. I’m going to tell them all about it, because I don’t remember the beach they took me to being anything like this. I want to tell them how it’s all different. And I’m going to tell Mum some things and Dad some other things so I can make sure to tell them everything in two letters so I don’t repeat anything or make it too long.”

“That’s a very good idea, Julian.” Innogen swallowed hard. “We’ll do that right when we get home.”

“Not right when we get home, we need to unpack and have dinner.”

“Right. _Correct_. After we get home and unpack, the day after tomorrow, we’ll make tea and write letters.”

“Good. Good night, Aunt Innogen.”

“Good night, Julian.” She smoothed his hair, and retreated to Sol’s study.

The only highlight of the trip back was when the ferry was gliding over the Channel, when Julian managed to turn away from the window long enough to ask, “Could I have a bar mitzvah?”

“I – you might. I don’t see why you couldn’t be able to, you’ve got three years to study. You’d have to work hard to learn everything, and we’d have to join a synagogue, but if you really wanted one then we’d be able to make it happen.”

“All right. Good.” He turned back to the water. Innogen waited, and he didn’t say more.

“Do you want a bar mitzvah?” She asked.

“No,” he shrugged. “I just wanted to know if I could have one.”


	16. These Apples

The next question Julian asked about what he might have came some weeks later during dinner: after asking her to pass the sprouts, he then requested that they might go to the new year’s services. That he asked her on a Friday wasn’t lost to Innogen, and she suspected Julian had waited some time for the day to come to pass, for the significance of one holiday to pass into another.

“I suppose we could, yes. I’ll see when they are, and where we can go, and then we’ll see what we can do.”

“Thank you, Aunt Innogen.”

“Of course, we’ll also have to find you something for your birthday. Unless you’d like it to be this?”

“It doesn’t do well for one to be greedy.”

In the end she was glad he’d asked. It wouldn’t have occurred to her otherwise to look into the possibility – it might have struck her some weeks after the fact, well into October and long past when the holiday had come and gone. That was how it’d happened many times for her, suddenly looking up and realizing she’d missed the day without knowing it, then doing her best to let the wistfulness wash off her. It wasn’t enough to make her genuinely sad, just low enough to feel somewhat down when she remembered something she thought she shouldn’t have forgotten. But that didn’t happen with Julian’s reminders, not this year. 

He insisted on waking early and walking the thirty minutes it took to get to the closest synagogue on foot; being driven there, or taking the train, was well out of the question. Moreover, he also insisted on going on a Shabbat morning to see what it was like to pray there generally. The synagogue was from the late nineteen-hundreds, and much more like the one she vaguely remembered from her childhood, with men and women sitting wherever they liked. And while the prayer books were books, good and proper books on paper with ink just like they’d been in Lebanon, half their words were in English.

The moment the first melodies began, the depth of her memories surprised her, the words flowing out of her mouth like water down a river. She barely had to breathe and they were leaving her without even having to stop and think about what came next, waiting inside of her, waiting all this time for the right time to be heard again.

But she’d forgotten more than she remembered: when Julian began to fidget during the first Amidah repetition, she was glad for the chance to leave for a few minutes as well. If she’d remembered it’d be coming, she would have warned him. And he didn’t sing, not once, but he stood and swayed with everyone when the services called for it.

They were back there in a far more crowded room three weeks later for both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the sanctuary filled to the brim. It was nothing like the thirty-seven people they’d seen on that Shabbat morning, but somehow, it was easier when they both knew there wasn’t any way their own voices would be heard by anyone around them, just by God. Because Julian was praying with her and the other adults instead of the children, they sat by an aisle in case it got too much and he needed to leave, but aside from having to use the toilet a few times, he never did.

When they left after the morning services broke, with no intention of returning for either the afternoon or evening portions, Innogen thought that might well be the end of it. For the most part, it was. But three and a half months later, when she asked him if he was ready to join her on the couch to watch the Yule Address, he hesitated.

“I’d just rather not, if that’s all right.”

“Are you feeling well?”

“Yes I am, Aunt Innogen. I’d just rather – I’d rather not watch it this year. If that’s all right.”

“Of course it is. I’m just wondering why, that’s all.”

“There doesn’t need to be one, does there?”

“Well – sometimes there does. There doesn’t always need to be. But you’ve always enjoyed it so much, I’m not sure why you’ve just stopped.”

“I know I have, and I might want to watch it later. Right now, I was just going to read in my room while you watched, and I might come down and join you. If that’s all right.”

“Julian, of course it’s all right.”

“Then it’s settled?”

Innogen tried not to smile at the way he asked the question, so hopeful and eager for something that didn’t even need to be asked. “Of course it’s settled.”

“Good, excellent. Ah, can I have a snack?”

“Certainly.” They went to the kitchen and she gave him access, but instead of something for him, he used it to get her a cup of her usual Yule Address tea, done as she liked it.

“Here you are, Aunt Innogen.”

“Thank you, Julian.” He stood expectant, not quite meeting her face but posture nearly shouting he was waiting for something, and Innogen ordered him his hot chocolate she handed to him with the usual dignity and grace of the ritual, even if there wasn’t anything behind it this year other than the ritual itself.

“Thank you, Aunt Innogen,” he said, and she didn’t see him come down the stairs until well past the end of the Address. When he came down for supper, and Innogen tried to bring up the subject with him, he would either give the impression of listening without doing so, or shift the subject as best he could.

Julian’s quiet but adamant refusal to even be tempted by the Address in his room was something Innogen knew she could write about to her brother and tell him everything without fear of censoring. The Address itself was fine, they wrote to each other about that every year – it was something they got to see on Mars, albeit twelve hours behind England itself. Julian was fine, too. So many things were there for them to speak about.

As for what wasn’t, Innogen filled in the empty spaces as best she could. Somehow, there was a good deal to be found in the public domain already. There was no way to check the precise specifications of the Martian prison, but its general location, its facilities, the amenities given to prisoners and the layout of the gardens. It wasn’t ever something she could do for very long. Triangulating what she knew already with what she learned took more out of her than she always thought it would. Even if she could clear her head by tidying her study and re-aligning the books on the shelves, it didn’t help her feel lighter.

But figuring out how to answer questions that weren’t being asked without directly saying she was doing so without even having to Mandrake it – that, at least, that had gotten easier. For Julian, as well.


	17. Fun & Games

Julian didn’t stop howling even when she walked into the room. Innogen hadn’t seen him cry like this in years, a deep bone-piercing crying that cracked her ears and tore at her throat, his face red and eyes dark and wild, legs curled underneath him and arms wrapped tight around himself as though that would keep him held together, rocking back and forth as he sobbed, trying and failing to swallow his tears and only crying harder for it.

She’d called a taxi to get to his school as soon as she’d gotten the school’s call. That had been nearly twenty minutes ago, which meant he’d been crying nearly all that time.

Innogen looked to the woman who’d brought her to Julian, who looked back with naked desperation; Innogen looked to Julian, who didn’t seem to have noticed her coming in, but she knew he knew she was there. He had to know. Of course he had to know, from how he had shut his eyes and was now trying to make himself stop. His crying had changed in pitch, becoming more of a deep-down sobbing as he gulped in air as best he could.

Julian stopped rocking and stayed curled forward around himself as Innogen sat on the school infirmary’s cot next to him. Miss Mayle closed the door behind her, and Innogen did her best to wait as Julian forced himself to end the crying, slowly and as best he could. He wasn’t quite done when he croaked out something. It took him four tries for Innogen to parse out that it was words. He stopped crying, wiped his face, swallowed and said clearly, “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Julian.” She listened to him force his breathing even, and waited until it was coming with a little less deliberate effort, to say, “I’m going to be back in a little while. As soon as this is done, we’re going home. You don’t need to worry about class for the rest of the day, so wash your face and have some water and wait until I get back. All right?”

“All right, Aunt Innogen. I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“But I’m _sorry_.”

“Yes, I know, thank you.”

“But –”

“ _Yes_ , Julian.” She squeezed her hand on his shoulder once, hard, before she let go and stood up, not even trying to look to his face. “I’ll make sure Miss Mayle knows you are. Now I’m going to go talk to her, and yes, I’ll tell her when I get there, and when I get back we’re going back home and having some lunch, all right?” He leaned back against the wall, eyes closed and looking ready to start crying again. “All right, Julian?”

His eyes were looking somewhere far away when he opened them, and his voice was somewhere else too, but wherever it was had to be better than here because it was calm and faint when he said, “All right, Aunt Innogen.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

She didn’t turn back to look at him through the door’s little window after it closed behind her, wiped her hands over her eyes and took a deep breath, and made her way to Miss Mayle’s office.

As the story went, they’d forcibly separated the boys as soon as they could get their hands on them. That hadn’t been enough to end the fight, because even with one of them bodily restrained in the teacher’s arms he’d kept on screaming and struggling like some animal, and had only started to calm down when a sedative was administered – shortly after which the crying had begun, and hadn’t stopped until her arrival. He hadn’t been injured as badly as the other boy, only scratches on his face and arms and neck. The other one had come out considerably worse, bruises across his face and a rather spectacular black eye that had taken a good deal of time to repair.

“Wait. Let me see that again.” Miss Mayle shrugged and handed the padd back. Innogen tabbed through the photos of Julian and the other boy. She hadn’t thought Julian capable of committing that sort of violence against anyone else, but there were the pictures of Arthur with the bruises and black eye and Julian with the scratches and marks on his face and neck and arms she’d seen on him earlier.

Some of the scratches.

“These were taken right after their fight?”

“When Julian had calmed down enough for us to document it, yes.”

“So before he was left alone.”

“Well, yes. Why do you ask?”

“Because there’s something I’m going to have to talk about with Julian later – it’s not about this. It’s about something I’d rather not talk about with you, right now. But why hasn’t he gotten treatment? You gave it to Arthur.”

“He hadn’t calmed down enough for us to administer anything.”

“I think he might be able to handle it now.”

“Then we’ll send someone on.”

“Can I do it?”

“Pardon?”

“Just the dermal regeneration. Just the very end stage of the treatment. I’d like to see all the injuries before they’re gone. I recognize this is an unusual request, and I’d be all right if it isn’t honored so long as you let me know why it is you can’t.”

“I – well, that hadn’t been my plan, to –”

“I’d be happy to be observed. And I wouldn’t be so bold as to think I’d know how to calibrate it properly. I’m sure your medical staff can do that themselves. All I want –”

“I don’t suppose that –”

“I’d at least like to observe the treatment. And see the full extent of the injuries before they’re removed.”

“I was only planning…” Miss Mayle stopped, and smiled the sort of bland, inoffensive smile Innogen had worked so hard to achieve for dealing with problem clients that it was almost flattering to be on the receiving end. “I’ll send someone to deal with Julian’s injuries, and why don’t you go on ahead.”

“Thank you.”

“I’d still very much like to speak with you about Julian’s behavior today.”

“I’d be very happy to do so, as soon as I see to my nephew.” She pushed down the impulse for a parting remark and instead marched herself off to confirm her worries.

Julian didn’t resist or respond when she lifted his arms or turned his head to get a better look at all the injuries he’d sustained. Innogen made sure to be gentle and careful, but he’d pushed himself somewhere inside to where he wouldn’t come out for a very long while. None of the wounds had been enough to cause serious damage, or even draw blood. But from how some were rising up and others were fresh and hot, and from the pictures she’d seen, the story they told wasn’t a good one. The pictures that had been taken as soon as Julian had been calm enough for them were missing a lot of what was on him right now. What he had done to himself was all far worse than what Arthur had managed.

When the nurse came in, he took one look at Julian and decided it would be best to let Innogen administer the treatment. Julian didn’t flinch when she began running the regenerator over his arms, and only managed half a sob when she had to take hold of and angle his chin to reach some of the scratches there. He didn’t even close his eyes as she healed up one arm, then the other, then his neck and finally his face. Nothing had gotten anywhere near his eyes, thank God. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly and forced herself to move like she was in control of everything when she handed the regenerator back.

“I’ll need a few minutes with Julian. Could you let me know what Miss Mayle would like to do? Or when she’d like to next see me?”

“By all means.”

“Thank you.”

Julian hiccoughed when Innogen put her hand on his shoulder, but didn’t push it away. She removed it herself, and watched him unfold himself, let his legs fall off the side of the couch and reach to the floor – he was almost as tall as she was, now, and he was just fourteen.

“Are you feeling better now?”

He jerked his head to the side, then gave her a nod.

“Are you ready to talk about what happened?”

This time it was a low croak when he shook his head.

“We’re going to have to talk about it. Someone will want to know, a lot of people want to know why on Earth you did what you did, and you’re going to need to talk about it. I’d like you to talk to me first. You’re going to have to tell me why, Julian, and I know you probably don’t want to but you’re going to need to. I’m going to need you to tell me why you attacked Arthur. And we need to talk about why you hurt yourself.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Yes, we do. We’ve talked about this before, we’ve agreed you wouldn’t do it, _you_ agreed you’d stop with it. I know you were upset today, and that’s – for God’s sake, you’re supposed to be _over_ doing this and you won’t even tell me _why_ you – why did you hurt yourself today? Can you tell me that, Julian?” He grunted, and pulled a leg onto the bed to lean his arm on it and look away, a perfectly posed replica of the sullen teenage boy from the movie _Laurel’s Song_. Because sitting the way he was now was exactly how people were supposed to sit when they were in this sort of situation. It made her want to cry as much as anything she’d yet seen from the day. “We’re going to have to talk about this. I know you don’t want to –”

“If you know that then why do we have to?” he shot out, the quietest shot she’d ever heard.

“Because it isn’t healthy, this isn’t _right_ , we’ve – _you_ agreed to stop it, you said you wouldn’t, and now I’m worried you’re going to start again, because –”

“It’s not going to start again.”

“Right, because it’ll only ever happen after you’re in a fight now? Is that it, that’s why this won’t happen again? Now I’m worried you’re going to be in fights, you _know_ that! I don’t know why this one happened today and no one else does, because you won’t –” She wiped her eyes. “No. I’m sorry for yelling. But you need to talk about this. If you don’t want to talk to me, maybe you might want to talk to Siobhan. Do –”

“No!”

Innogen forced her voice out firm, “No, you don’t want to talk to me, or no, you don’t want to talk to Siobhan?”

Julian wasn’t shaking his hands; he was clenching them under his arms, shouting loud and clear without saying a word the answer was _no_ for both. Innogen waited, and he finally whispered, “Siobhan.”

“Then we’re going to have to talk about it.”

“No,” he said.

“The school could appoint –”

“Fine. Fine! Siobhan! I’ll talk to her! Fine! Okay!”

“Do you want to talk to her about the fight, too?”

“Yes.” Everything had gone out of him, all the anger, all the resistance, and he was only upright because of how he leaned against the wall. He wasn’t even trying to look at her, which suited Innogen just fine.

“Please tell me one thing.” He shrugged one shoulder, as good a positive response as she knew she would get. “What did Arthur do?” Julian shook his head. “I’m sorry if it hurts to talk about, but it’s something we need to know. And I just think it’d be best if you tell me first. What had he –”

“He’d been making noises.”

“Noises.”

“He’d been making noises at me.”

“Arthur had been making noises at you.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of noises was he making?”

“Just noises.”

“Yes, but what _kind_ of –”

“Just _noises_ , Aunt Innogen. I’d asked him to stop. He didn’t.”

“And that’s –”

“I _asked_ him, Aunt Innogen, and he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t, I asked him all the time and he never, I ignored him and he still wouldn’t, I do what everybody tells me to do when there’s someone like that who keeps making noises that don’t make sense just going because they know how much I want them to stop because they _like_ seeing me upset like that because they think it’s _funny_ and I got mad and I didn’t think I just didn’t want to _hear them anymore_ and I’m sorry I said I’m sorry and I _mean it_ but I’m not going to say it to _him_ but I’m sorry to you and Siobhan but not to him or Miss Mayle I’m sorry to you, Aunt Innogen, I’m sorry to you.”

“I know you’re sorry to me, Julian. Thank you for saying you’re sorry to me. I don’t think you need to be sorry to Arthur, he doesn’t sound like he’s someone you need to be sorry to.”

“I know he isn’t.”

“I didn’t know that until you told me.” She leaned away from him. Innogen waited until he stopped looking ready to cry and just looked sad. “I have to go see Miss Mayle, and then I’ll call Siobhan later today. But then we’re going right home and having lunch.” Julian didn’t respond. “All right?”

“All right, Aunt Innogen.”

The med staff was still waiting outside with a little wry smile that Innogen wanted to punch off his face. “Thank you,” she said, smiling back in much the same way. “I appreciate you letting me be the one to treat him.”

“I’m pretty glad you volunteered. I would’ve had to wait for him to wear himself out.”

“I suppose you might well have.” She pulled her shoulders back. “Was what he did to the other boy as bad as the pictures made it look?”

“Yes.”

“Shit.” She wiped her eyes again. “Sorry. It’s been a trying day.”

“Missus Bashir, after what happened, it’s quite all right.”

“Miss.”

“Hm?”

“It’s Miss Bashir, thank you.” She didn’t stay with him long enough to last through another round of apologies, and made her way down the corridors to Miss Mayle’s office instead. After she sat down, she was given good enough reason to repeat herself, but managed to refrain. Miss Mayle tried to make it sound like she was being generous, and Innogen knew it there was definitely a chance that was the case, but she still had to ask. “And Arthur. What’s his punishment?”

“His – I’m sorry?”

“Arthur’s punishment. What’s that going to be? Or am I not allowed to be told that?”

“No. Well, I’m not quite sure.”

“Oh, so he is getting punished as well. That’s good.”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Bashir, but what have I said that you construed he’s getting any sort of punishment?”

“Hang on. He isn’t?” She leaned back in her chair. “Now please do forgive me, but that’s a load of bollocks.”

“Miss Bashir, I’d appreciate it if –”

“Because Arthur is at least as much deserving of punishment for _instigating_ the fight to begin with.”

“How might that be? Go on, tell me, please.”

“Fights like this don’t happen without cause, Miss Mayle.”

“They don’t?”

“No, they don’t, and I don’t like what you’re trying to say about Julian. He wouldn’t have gotten in a fight like this if something hadn’t pushed him to it. What did Arthur do? Someone must have been watching to pay attention.”

“What makes you think Arthur did anything?”

“Because, with all due respect, I know my nephew better than you do. And I know he didn’t simply attack Arthur without any cause. And I _asked my nephew_ , who told me Arthur has been systematically taunting and provoking him for some time now but no one’s given it any thought until it got to be too much for him, which I find somewhat strange given all I’ve been told about the tolerance policies at this school, so I have to think _someone_ must have seen _something_ today.”

Miss Mayle smiled inoffensively at Innogen. “You’re right. We’d do well to ask around and see what everyone has to say about what transpired earlier.” From her tone, Innogen knew that was the best offer she’d receive, and smiled inoffensively back at her. They kept that up for the remainder of their meeting, discussing the logistics of Julian’s schoolwork and what additional assignments he might receive as part of the due course of punishment. When she finally left, Innogen was glad she was more numb than drained; she couldn’t afford to feel that way quite yet.

They took a taxi home. The time spent waiting for one to arrive after calling the dispatcher, with everyone coming and going while they sat in the main office was worth every second to go home in some measure of privacy. Innogen could tell a ride on the train, with everything that required, wouldn’t do Julian any favors.

He gobbled down his lunch and quickly retreated to his room while she lingered at the table with a mug of tea. She let the steam brush over her face before she took it upstairs to her study and her comm console and called up Siobhan, who looked like she took the news about Julian being in a fight better than Innogen had.

“He’s been suspended for the rest of the week, so whenever you’re free for a session, he’ll be able to make it.”

“I guess that’s something, at least.” She rubbed the corners of her eyes and pushed her glasses back up. “Is tomorrow morning too short a notice, or…?”

“No, tomorrow morning should be fine. It’s not too short notice on your part?”

“I’ll just reschedule my usual paperwork filing time.”

“Thank you.” Innogen lifted her shoulders and braced herself. “His school’s going to want to talk to you.”

“I’d be more surprised if they didn’t.”

“Right, yes.” She nodded and braced herself again. “Julian said, about the fight, that – he began the fighting itself, but he was provoked into it. I was told they’d speak to the other boy, but don’t think they’re going to look too far into it. If there’s anything you might say to make them reconsider that?”

“Did he say what provoked him?”

“That the other boy kept making noises.”

“Right.” She leaned back, away from her screen. Innogen glanced behind her, taking in Siobhan’s office – she didn’t go inside it often these days. The books on the shelves had been rearranged since she’d last seen them several months ago. “I’ll have to call the school before they call me.”

“Thank you.” Innogen managed a smile. “So we’ll see you tomorrow morning, then.”

“Ten sharp.”

“Ten sharp,” she repeated, and cut the comm. Ruder than she usually wanted to be, but she had to call the agency and let them know about tomorrow as well – she couldn’t just take the morning, not when she knew Julian would need her for the rest of the day, and she might be able to bring him in for the rest of the week if he stayed quiet and out of the way in her office if they wouldn’t let her work from home, not with the way the current Hotel Mortensen re-branding project was coming down the pike. She knew that emergencies happened, and everyone who had to care for a child knew that the child had to come first.

And she hated knowing that from experience.

Innogen stood up and stared out the window. Her hands shook and she crossed her arms over her chest, then curled in on herself, everything shaking inside and out. _Herky-jerky_ , she’d called it when she’d been a child, when she got this way – when things got to be too much, when she shook and jerked so much that she’d feel like she’d shattered and had to stay still to keep from blasting apart into smithereens. She forced herself to stand straight up but that didn’t stop anything; she closed her eyes and took even, regular deep breaths and it didn’t do a shred of good.

She struck her thigh with her fist, hard, struck it twice, and clapped both hands over her mouth to keep her cries in and from doing it again.


	18. Blame It On Me

When Innogen and Julian arrived at Siobhan’s office, there wasn’t even time to talk about the weather before Julian was heading inside, more than ready to get on with the details of his crimes and their punishments. Innogen sat and read in the waiting area until Julian’s time was up and she could take her own session with Siobhan. Rather thankfully, neither of them was in a space to do anything but begin talking right away.

“We’re meeting with the school’s administration this afternoon,” Innogen said.

Siobhan nodded. “He told me.”

“Did he tell you he doesn’t like the idea of us using that he’s autistic to leverage a lesser punishment?”

“He told me that, too. Not so succinctly, though. But I take it that means you’ve already talked to him about how we’re going with that plan.” 

“I talked. Julian didn’t. But he didn’t protest against it, either.”

The night before, they’d had a once-rare now-infrequent shouting match, Julian going so far as to swear at her, calling on the worst vulgarity a fourteen-year-old boy could muster – nothing Innogen hadn’t heard a hundred thousand times before from a hundred thousand different places, only shocking for her having never before heard any of it from Julian. 

“It hasn’t been an easy thing for him to make peace with.”

“I know. We talked about it last night – how if he wasn’t autistic, he wouldn’t have gotten in the fight at all, but he is, so he did, and because he’s autistic, he shouldn’t be punished for things beyond either his control or his capacity for control.” She rolled her head back to stare up at the ceiling, and tried to find patterns in the shapes there. “It’s not sitting well with him. The fact that it’s what we need to do, and he knows that, is making it worse for him. He took a bath last night. He hasn’t taken a bath since he was eight. I know this is going to be over at some point, eventually, somewhere in the future. I just can’t – is there anything you can do to help him get through it?”

“I’m doing what I can.”

Innogen swung her head back down and around. “I know, and I appreciate that, but isn’t there more?”

Siobhan looked away. Innogen didn’t like the expression that came onto her face for a moment and disappeared behind her usual composure, as though her glasses weren’t barrier enough. When she looked back, she was smiling, and Innogen forced the worms in her stomach to stop wriggling through her guts and steel herself as best she could. _Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered._

“There’s something I’ve been waiting to discuss.” 

“And that is…?”

“I’d like to talk to you about putting Julian onto medication.”

“Medication,” Innogen echoed. Siobhan nodded. “That’s your grand new idea. Not more therapy, not more – you’re saying we should just put him on something?”

“No, Miss Bashir, that isn’t what I’m saying at all, but if that’s what you’ve heard then I apologize. Let me try to be clearer: I think Julian’s gotten to the point where, to help him manage himself, he needs something more than what I or any other professional could give him alone.”

“So we put him on something.”

“His school administration’s would be happy to hear we’re even just _discussing_ it. It’d go a long way towards smoothing out the process, especially if we go so far as to say we’re actually considering it.”

“You sound like you’ve been _considering_ this for some time.”

“I don’t want to make it seem like –”

“His school would really go for this. That we’re just going to dose his problems away.”

“Please don’t be crass.”

“I don’t see how I could be anything but. I know you know what the last day’s been like for me, so if you could –”

“Do you think this is the first time I’ve had to deal with a situation like what Julian’s going through right now?” The sharpness of Siobhan’s usually gentle voice shut Innogen up immediately. It was clear in her eyes, her shoulders, her hands. “Innogen, I know this is the first time something like this has happened to you, but this isn’t the first time something like this has ever happened. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with this sort of situation. I can’t discuss the specifics of my other patients and their families, but I can tell you I know what I’m doing from experience. Quite a bit of it, even. And I know we both know Julian’s in need of more help right now than he has for some time.”

“I…” She swallowed and closed her eyes long enough to take a deep breath. “I think I’d like it more – even the _idea_ of it, I think I’d like the _idea_ of it more, if it wasn’t coming right now.” Siobhan pushed her glasses up her nose. “If it wasn’t coming right now, then maybe…I don’t know. No, that’s not true. I know that – well, I think that…” She swallowed back the tears that were threatening to fall. “I don’t want him to see it as some sort of punishment.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“I’m worried that’s how he’s going to see it.”

“You think he’ll see it that way?”

“I don’t know.”

“Medication isn’t a punishment.” Innogen felt her shoulders drop, and looked up at the ceiling. “You’ve seen how he’s struggling with himself.”

“That’s a very polite way to describe it.”

“He told me about his biting after the fight.”

“God. I thought he was _done_ with that, he hasn’t done any biting since he was eleven.”

“He hasn’t done any biting since he was eleven that he’s told either of us about.” Innogen whipped her head about to stare at her. “We need to be honest about what Julian needs right now. He’s trying very hard to be himself, and that’s getting harder and harder for him.”

“And let me guess. You wouldn’t be suggesting medication at all if you thought there was something else we might do first.”

“You’ve guessed right.”

“Bugger all this,” Innogen whispered. “Look, I know he’s not good with feelings, not his own or anyone else’s, he never has been. But it still seems – it seems so _final_. And I know, yes, I know the fight, he did more damage to himself than Arthur did, and he did a lot of damage to Arthur too, and I know anything I can do to help him stay in his classes or keep this from this hanging over him longer than it has to, that – does it ever not feel like a defeat, suggesting it?”

“Sometimes.”

“And if you could talk about your other patients, I’m sure you could share some anecdotes about that.”

“I can offer suggestions for support groups.”

“Brilliant. Wonderful. I’ll get right on those.”

“Innogen.”

“Is this giving in, or giving up?”

“Neither. This is getting Julian the help he needs. This is a kindness.”

“This _would_ be a kindness. If we go through with it. We should talk about it with Julian first, we really should, can we get him in here? Tell him he needs medication, that he has to consider it for the sake of what the school administration is going to think because they’d really like to hear it? Should I just go get him?”

“You can if you want to. He’s a minor and you’re his legal guardian. When it comes right down to it, he doesn’t have as much of a say in this as you do. If you give the word for it, then we’ll make an appointment with a prescribing physician.” She sat back down. “But you can ask him if you’d like.”

“I don’t particularly want to. But I know I should.”

Siobhan smiled, sharpness gone; Innogen didn’t smile back, too tired within herself. “Would you like me to go get him?”

“Please.”

Julian stayed quiet for the rest of the meeting and didn’t seem to hold any strong feelings one way or the other. Innogen wondered if they might well have done better to wait to bring it up with him when he was more himself, and did her best not to linger on the theoretical. Instead, she took Julian out to one of his favorite cafés near Siobhan’s office, where he ate quickly and dutifully, the way he always did. Her suggestion they get off the train two stops early was met with a similar lack of either enthusiasm or protest, but even the act of walking on empty residential streets didn’t have the desired effect of encouraging him to speak.

Innogen tried anyway. “You know you’ll be coming to the office with me on Thursday and Friday.”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you know what to say if anyone asks why you’re there?”

“I’ll tell them that there was some trouble at school.”

“Right. You don’t need to say more than that.”

“I wasn’t going to.” Julian looked up towards the tired November sunlight coming through the trees. When Innogen followed his gaze, she saw he wasn’t looking at the sunlight, but a pair of tiny sparrows hopping along an empty branch. They flew off, and Innogen watched Julian watch them go.

“Then there shouldn’t be any problems, then.” 

“No.”

“Julian, are you –”

“Do you think I should go onto medication?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you think I should go onto medication?”

“That – I don’t quite see how that follows.”

“Because I know you think I should, but you haven’t said so yet, and I’d quite deeply appreciate it if you’d simply tell me that you do.”

“Julian, I don’t – look, whatever I feel one way or the other about that, then –”

“Then you might as well just tell me what you feel, since it doesn’t seem to matter much one way or the other.”

“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.” She tried to keep her voice even, focusing on the pavement in front of her, and only belatedly realized Julian had stopped walking beside her. He was standing about three meters behind, not even looking at her, and made a sound somewhere from the back of his throat before jerking his head up and making another deep-down sound.

“If it doesn’t _matter_ , Aunt Innogen, then why not go ahead and tell me?”

“Because – why does this matter to you so much? You know you don’t –”

“I know you want me to go onto medication.”

“You what?”

“I know you –”

“ _Yes_ , Julian, I heard you fine, no need to keep repeating yourself, thank you.” He glared in her general direction. “Whatever I want, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not up to me. This is –”

“It _does_ matter, Aunt Innogen, and if you’d listen –”

“This is _your_ decision, Julian, _not mine_ , whatever I might think doesn’t matter right now because I’m not going to order anything onto you! Do you understand _that_? Please tell me you’ve gotten at least that much to fit inside your head, please, this isn’t up to me right now, it _could_ well be but it’s not, Julian, it’s not mine at all. This is yours.” Julian kept looking in her general direction, vaguely focusing onto her. “Julian, if you think I’m going to order you to go onto medication, you’re wrong. I’m not going to order you to do anything, no matter how much I might or might not want – this isn’t _about me_ , this is about _you_ , and if you can’t see that I don’t – enough. We’re going home now. Right now. We can talk more when we get there. Now, let’s _go_.”

Julian began going, keeping pace with Innogen and then overtaking her, turning the corner onto Maunsel Street and reaching home first in order to hold the door open. Innogen forced herself to keep an empty face as she walked inside.

“Can I make us some tea?” Julian asked as she took off her shoes.

“Pardon?”

“I was going to make myself some tea. Would you like some as well? I could just as easily replicate or brew a second cup.”

“Julian, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? I was thinking of some peach oolong, we still have some of that loose for brewing, but if you’d like something else I could –”

“No, really. I’m fine –”

“Aunt Innogen, can I _please_ make you some tea?”

“All right, Julian. I’ll take a cup of tea.”

“Wonderful.” She heard the order and hum of the replicator as she sat down in the living room. He didn’t quite look at her, but she said “Thank you” just the same. Innogen watched him sit, trying to take up as little space as he could, no longer sprawling all over everywhere but sitting with one leg pulled up and held close by an arm around the bent knee, leaning into the arm of the couch, hugging the tea to his chest.

“I would like to,” he said quietly.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to start medication.”

“We’re seeing Siobhan tomorrow. We could tell her now, and talk about it with her then, or just tell her then.”

“We should tell her today.”

“After we’re done with our tea, of course.”

“Of course,” he said, barely smiling. Which was still a smile. He shifted around, and then asked, “It’s not going to go on my permanent record, will it?”

“It’s – what? Medication?”

“No, the fight.” 

“Why would a fight go onto a permanent record? What made you think about that?”

“Don’t fights go onto those things?”

“No. Julian, no one in England _has_ a ‘permanent record.’ Those don’t exist outside of American movies.”

“Oh.” He said the one word with such bare relief Innogen almost didn’t think it deserved it. “I was just worried.”

“Worried over what?”

“Just worried.” Julian drained the last of his tea. “I thought that if this went onto my permanent record, because it’s permanent, it’d stick with me wherever I went, and anyone would see it if I ever applied to university, and I wouldn’t get a good chance at a decent education.”

“That was – Julian, you don’t need to worry about that.” Innogen took his cup when he handed it over. “We’re meeting with the school administration tomorrow to discuss your and Arthur’s punishments. Once those are over, this infraction won’t stay around. There’s no permanent records anywhere for it to _go_ into. You’ll be fine.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Nobody told me about that.”

“No one at all, or no one at school?”

“At school. Everyone makes such a fuss over all the little exams and grades we have, not just finals. I always thought everything was important.”

“Most of it,” Innogen clarified. “Not everything.”

“How can you know?”

“Experience, mostly.”

He nodded, considering. “What sorts of things are important?”

“The sorts of things that come on paper.”

“Do I…do I have a lot of things that come on paper?”

“Julian, are you still worried?”

“No,” he said. “Not anymore, no. I’m not.”


	19. Why Say Anything Nice?

Arthur refused to look at Julian, which was more than all right since Julian didn’t need another reason to be anxious and upset. All three of Arthur’s parents were there, his mother and both his fathers, and none of them seemed terribly happy to be sitting at this meeting. Innogen and Siobhan had taken a good deal of time that morning around the dining room table preparing Julian for what might be said as best they could, but there was only so much that could be done before he had to bear Arthur’s presence – though Julian had been the one who’d physically attacked Arthur, he was more afraid of Arthur than Arthur was of him.

On top of everything else, going to school when he wasn’t attending classes was throwing him off. Innogen put her hand on top of Julian’s, and he stopped kicking the table leg in four-four time.

What Innogen wanted to do was scream at the principal and the teacher who’d let it happen for having let it happen at all, and instead she spoke contritely about how Julian would most certainly never do such a thing again. Siobhan spoke on her family’s behalf more eloquently than she knew she’d have been able to, given the circumstances. She’d allowed herself the fantasy of Julian receiving an apology from Arthur right there in the meeting, and nodded through the reality of Julian having to deliver one to him instead.

“Should I write it for him, too?”

“Pardon?” Everyone turned to look at Julian, Innogen especially – it’d been the most he’d said the entire meeting.

“My apology. Would Arthur like me to write it for him? On paper, with ink? I could do that.”

“We’re doing it that way?” One of his fathers asked.

“Actually, we might well. Both of them have to apologize to the other. We might as well have them write it as letters.”

“Isn’t that a bit old-fashioned?” Arthur’s mother asked.

“I think we could do with a little old fashioned,” Siobhan replied, smooth and cold. In the end, it was agreed to as part of the whole parcel of Julian and Arthur’s punishments.

After it was over, Innogen wanted to congratulate Julian for not crying. Instead, as soon as the door slid shut behind them, they found a secluded spot in the campus library and began discussing arrangements for his medication with Siobhan, the better to get it all done sooner. 

As for the rest of the week, the only trouble Innogen received over bringing Julian into the office while he was on suspension came early on Thursday. There hadn’t been any trouble at first, signing Julian for a temporary visitor’s ID card, and he had been genuinely friendly and polite to McCourt who’d stopped Innogen in the hallway to ask about the Aldine project, ignoring Julian after the initial exchange of greetings. It had come ten minutes after that, when Gibson spotted Julian at Innogen’s desk, getting everything set up for his day. Innogen was just returning from the pantry with tea for them both, and saw Gibson trying to look innocent as he peered into her office from down the hall and around a corner, looking like he knew he was up to something rather unsavory. She walked carefully and quietly until she was standing just behind Gibson, all the better to remind him he wasn’t as invisible as he thought he was.

“Good morning, Gibson!” She smiled with all of her teeth; she meant it when he jumped and for the look on his face when his eyes met hers.

“Oh, ah, hello Bashir.”

“Thank you.” She kept smiling. “Nice weather today, isn’t it?”

“It’s nice enough, I suppose.”

“Oh, I think it’s _quite_ nice.”

“I – I guess it could be, if you like fog,” he allowed.

“And I do, you know? I _really_ do.” Innogen kept her voice up and light, as much as she could manage, even with both the teas rapidly cooling in the air. Cold tea wasn’t as nice as warm tea, but Gibson deserved every moment of this. She pushed every piece of her anger into her smile. “London’s fog really is one of its loveliest features. I had other reasons for wanting to live in the city, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say how much the fog drew me here to start with.”

“That’s – that’s very nice.” He swallowed, and glanced around for an exit. “I’m not a big fan of it myself.”

“Well, lucky you, you’re not alone in that. Deirdre Zunder – one of the printers, she retired just over three years ago, just a little while before you came aboard, actually, pity, you would’ve liked her – she didn’t much care for the fog, either. She would always say how it was a manufactured phenomenon, nothing like the regular weather and rainstorms we get, something we got the weather control netting to set up on behalf of the tourists.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“It’s absolutely true, though. The fog started coming back about eighty years ago, more or less, to coincide with the return of the _Enterprise_ , I think to capitalize on the hopeful nostalgia. Looking back as we move forward, all of it very grounded in the love of the past as the world keeps moving faster, classic advertising campaign work. I think that was part of the campaign, I’d have to check. I distinctly remember it being for the tourists, not current residents, though _everyone’s_ fond of it now. The funny thing about Zunder’s complaints about the fog, though – she was always saying how she could remember there not being these, what did she say, ‘ghastly bloody low-sitting clouds,’ that was it, these ghastly bloody low-sitting clouds when she was younger, but it was us that spearheaded that campaign.”

“Really?”

“It’s in our archives. I’m sure Blumenthal would give you a tour of them if you asked nicely, she loves showing people around.”

“That’s a great idea, Bashir. Thank you. Do you –”

“But you can’t do it now, of course.” Innogen pulled her lips back again, not in a smile this time, just to bare her teeth without any charade about what she meant. “We’ve got the Behr presentation tomorrow, and you’re the one doing the posters. Is everything all right with them?” she asked, forcing sweetness.

“It’s all fine, fine, quite fine.”

“Good. Now, if there’s anything I can help you with, you’ve demonstrated that you can find my office if you need me.” Innogen dropped her smile. “And if there isn’t, might I suggest not snooping around in other’s business? I don’t remember if Roth wanted you to drop by and ask about the typeface choice, but it couldn’t hurt to check.”

“Right. I’ll get on that.” He turned and left for his cubicle. 

Innogen stepped inside long enough to let Julian know she’d be right back, sped back to the pantry and returned with freshly replicated tea, encountered no one on her way back, and closed the door behind her. 

“Thank you, Aunt Innogen,” Julian said when he took the tea, warm this time, and went right back to his schoolwork.

“You’re welcome, Julian.” She took a few moments to look out over the city before returning to her own day’s tasks. It was still reasonably new; she’d had her office for less time than Gibson had been employed at the agency. Much as she loved the view, and the space, she’d had some trouble adjusting to it, almost enough that she’d wanted back to her own cubicle for the very first days. She’d known once the novelty wore off and everything became part of her usual routine, she’d get back to working just fine, and it’d taken less time to adjust than she’d thought. But sometimes, like when Julian had come in today and stared in amazement, only his third visit here, she’d been reminded of how nice a space it was. From this height, they could see a good deal of the City spread out before them. They were high enough pigeons and seagulls could land quite easily, and another building just a few numbers down had a pair of mated falcons that had their own live camera feed. There would be chicks again, in a few months. She might well have some plants in her office by then.

Innogen looked out at the fog below, took another sip of tea, and got onto her own work. She’d never quite figured out how to delegate, had always taken charge whenever she could simply to avoid unclear orders, and though responsibility wasn’t chafing, it was still too new to be comfortable.

During the duration of his usual school hours, Julian did his work, read his books, read the paper books Innogen kept in her office, and stared out the window. Innogen brought him lunch that he wouldn’t have to eat in the commissary along with everyone else, and he spent a large part of the afternoon walking through the office’s hallways and corridors until he would have been let out of school. They’d talked about him staying on the full working day, and almost immediately rejected that as a possibility. Julian could make his own way home, and he was used to being alone in the house.

Friday was much the same, save that Julian sat in the back and clapped politely at the end of the Behr presentation and left for home almost immediately after it was done, just as soon as he’d gobbled down his sandwiches from the buffet. Innogen gave him a smile, let him know she’d be home at her usual time, and watched him go.

“Is he doin’ okay?”

Innogen almost jumped at Chedosi’s question, her mouth so full of tuna and harissa sandwich that she couldn’t even make a surprised exclamation. She turned, mimed needing a moment to chew, and forced everything down as fast as she could even with Chedosi nodding to give her permission to take her time.

“He is, yes. Thank you for asking.”

“Good. I wouldn’t like t’hear otherwise.” Her crest lay relaxed and honest. “He’s a very kind young man.”

“Thank you,” she repeated, not sure what to say next. Chedosi’s words had made something skittering on the edge of her skin settle down for the first time in days. “I – I appreciate hearing that.”

“He is, y’know. I’d hate to hear he’s not doin’ well.”

“I’d hate to say if he was. But thankfully, not many people have asked about him.”

“Have not many people wanted to, or needed to?”

Innogen pursed her lips and decided against explaining away her comment as an attempt at making a joke. “It’s not that they don’t _want_ to…”

“Gotcha. And is it a Human thing or an England thing?”

“It’s an England thing.”

“Someday I’ll learn to parse out the difference.”

“I’m still working on it myself,” Innogen said, and they laughed again even if she hadn’t quite meant it as a joke. Chedosi was more or less the only person Innogen had ever known that could share jokes about having to make that distinction. But she wasn’t in the mood to make light of anything, not just yet. “About – with Julian right now, though. It’s not so much a Human thing or an England thing, it isn’t even really a Bashir thing. It’s a Julian thing, if that makes sense.”

“It does.” She dipped her head. “An’ just say the word, that’ll be the last you’ll hear of it from me.”

“Thank you.” Innogen dipped her head back, a little deeper than Chedosi had dipped hers to show how thankful she was. When she got home after drifting and breezing through the day, there was a surprise waiting for her in her office: Julian had placed copies of his hand-written apology letters to Arthur and his teacher in a folder on her desk, with a note asking her for some help in the matter. He hadn’t asked her for help in his writing since he was eight, and she looked through the papers to make sure he still didn’t with a brush of pride she was more than happy to describe to his parents when it came time to write them their next letters. Amidst the rest of the mess, it was a brief piece of brightness – pleasant as it would be for them to never know of the entire incident, Innogen knew it wouldn’t be a kindness to keep it from them.

When they wrote back, both of them thanked her.


	20. Bank Job

Innogen hadn’t ever stopped her petitioning for information about Julian’s parents, not entirely; there was less reason, with more that could be said openly between them, and less space in her mind, with her own life and Julian’s life continuing on, moving faster than their correspondences could allow. She never forgot, and never ceased, but had stopped asking so frequently. It had become another ritual, close to an obligation or even a duty, to be fulfilled when the surrounding circumstances dictated.

That was why it was a surprise to receive, along with letters of thanks for providing news of Julian’s fight in school, an invitation to a private audience at the FISA headquarters in London. something she hadn’t fantasized about receiving for years. She had been halfway up the stairs to her office before the return address properly registered, and she stood in between floors, gripping the paper, trying not to wonder what had been said to bring it about at last. It wouldn’t do her any good to ask why; the only good would come of going to her office and letting them know exactly when _her earliest convenience_ would be.

She was there the next morning just as it opened. Much earlier, when it was still dark outside, she’d let her supervisors know she wasn’t quite feeling up to coming into the office but would absolutely be able to make it in the next day. As soon as she’d sent it, she went back to sleep for another hour, and then took her time in preparing for something she’d barely thought about in years but which remained altogether quite vivid for its dormancy. The fantasies usually had her shouting at a panel of judges or agents, demanding they release everything they knew, and sometimes they even ended with her walking out of the building with a briefcase full of highly classified documents, just like in all the old movies.

None of the old movies ever talked about how long it took to wait for appointments; she’d learned that by hard experience, and had made it about halfway through the short story collection she’d loaded onto her padd before someone called her name.

It came from a blond man with an insincere smile. “Miss Innogen Bashir?” he said again, in a bland American accent.

“Yes, I am.” Innogen stood and nodded without offering a hand. “And your name?”

“Lawrence Stenwick. Mister Stenwick, if that’s all right.”

“Mister Stenwick, it’s good to meet you.”

“Likewise.” He kept on smiling, not at all like he meant it. “My office is on the fourth – my apologies. My office is on the third floor. Shall we?”

“If it’s not too inconvenient for you.”

“Not at all, Miss Bashir,” he said with a laugh, and when they arrived, he fell back so she could enter first.

It wasn’t quite so large or luxurious an office as hers – only one small window with hardly anything to see out of it, just the building’s inner courtyard and not even from a high vantage point, very little room for even one person to move around with much ease, let alone two, almost nothing to show any of Stenwick’s personality, the only token gestures being a pair of holo-portraits on the wall that might or might not have been a wife and his children and a landscape that almost looked like England.

“Maine.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s Maine. Where I’m from. Have a seat, Miss Bashir.” He grabbed the padds on the chair behind the desk and set them on top of a cabinet, and Innogen did the same with the ones on the chair in front of it, sitting down as soon as she could. Stenwick didn’t join her, but kept on bustling around the office. “I have to say, I don’t have too many meetings like this. I don’t mind, they’re always nice when they come up.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Innogen said as he pulled open a drawer with a metallic whine, and began flipping through the files.

“It’s not too often that I have an opportunity to share what I do with people. You’ll have to forgive me if I seem a little eager.”

“Are you allowed to tell me why that is?”

“That, yes, as a matter of fact. Generally, when information is finally declassified, it’s publically available for anyone to request it. But there aren’t many pieces that have to remain on a need-to-know basis which _also_ receive limited clearance.” He handed her a midsized plain tan folder, filled rather neatly with both handwritten and computer-printed pages. “With a case like your family’s, it’s important to keep the channels limited.”

“Am I allowed to take any of this with me?”

“I can’t give you blanket permission for that. But you can make a note with me which pieces you’d like, and before you go I can get you copies.”

“How much time do I have with these originals?”

“As much as you like,” he smiled, “as long as you stay in here.”

“I see.” Innogen smiled insincerely right back at him. “Then please make this note: I want everything I’m allowed to have.”

“Certainly, Miss Bashir.”

There wasn’t a clock in the office, and she hadn’t checked the time when she came in, but her padd recorded that for her, one of the new features of the book-reader program she’d installed a few months earlier. When she checked it in the lift, after finally having her fill of the messy little room, it said she’d turned it off just before going in there some three and a half hours earlier. She could well have spent twice that with that file, if her body had allowed.

As it was, roughly half of it was coming home with her.

Back in her office, she spent the rest of the afternoon equally glad she didn’t have anywhere else she needed to be, and in resigned despair over what she forced herself to read for the fourth or fifth time. The first of it had hit her hard enough to punch the air out of her; now it was only painful. She’d known the base charge of treason. That, she’d learned nearly as soon as it had been committed, Julian’s parents arrested, tried, convicted and incarcerated in nearly no time at all. But the precise details of their motivations, the information on how they’d attempted to go about becoming lawbreakers was information Innogen hadn’t yet been lucky enough to learn.

The note she’d received had said it was partly because of their transfer. That their good behavior was being rewarded in more ways than one. How there would be yet more rewards, for them and the rest of their family. Rewards she’d soon discuss with Julian.

After she read through the papers just one more time.

For the most part, the raw facts of the case were easy enough to digest. The one item that she struggled to get down, the page that she lingered on the longest because she couldn’t make sense of something that she would have believed as a piece of nonsense and laughed at if anyone had told her, was that their contact had been in Holland. Innogen had never been to that particular country, but if there was any easily accessible channel into the galactic underworld, she wouldn’t have guessed it’d be in Holland. 

Did anyone wait for Julian’s parents at the ferryport? Had there been _WELCOME TO HOLLAND_ banners for them? If they’d stayed in Holland instead of coming back to England before attempting to finalize their plans, might they have been successful? 

She’d known neither of Julian’s parents had been capable of breaking the law and committing treason on their own. The official charges for _conspiracy to commit treason_ were closer to what she knew they were capable of. Julian’s father had always made friends much more easily than Innogen ever could – she could grasp how he’d found his way to the right people, the correct networks, to have access to the channels he needed for his plans. What those networks were, Innogen didn’t want to dream of. The plans she’d have no choice about, not with how they were right in front of her, his admission of guilt recorded and filed away for the proper authorities. Both of Julian’s parents openly confessing to the charges and then explaining why they’d pursued such a conspiracy: they’d wanted their son to smile at them.

The court transcriptions didn’t include any notes recording when someone paused to cry, or if they’d shouted, whether or not they’d smiled at a particular memory or if they’d needed a moment to collect their thoughts. It just had the words. Somehow that made it more chilling to Innogen: not knowing how his parents had admitted to their guilt. They might easily have been proud or hateful, resentful or regretful. She’d known her brother, and she’d known his wife, and she knew they wouldn’t have been happy. But she couldn’t know if they’d be sad, as well. 

She’d just have to ask them, when she next saw them.

Innogen made a space for the files on a shelf, next to their letters, next to the journals and publications with pieces directly about Julian or simply mentioning him in passing, keeping everything as together as she could. Even though she still made the time to write letters with Julian, writing to his parents by herself wasn’t something she could feel any guilt or disappointment over. Not when she knew she could tell them she knew, that she’d been informed of their full charges and sentencing, that she very much wanted to see them. But not that she couldn’t grasp why they’d tried. Because that, and that alone, she didn’t want to see if she could try to understand. Not even to try.

It took much less time for mail to return from New Zealand than from Mars. For the first time since they’d begun writing, nothing had been excised. All of their apologies, every last word of their sorrow, remained intact.

And for the first time in years, she wondered what they might have to say to Julian.

He took the news of transfer and visitation well – well enough that when she asked him if they might make it over to the other side of the world, he didn’t stop to think before asking Innogen when they might be going.

“As soon as we can find the time,” Innogen said. “Why don’t we write to them today and let them know?”

He nodded slowly, not quite smiling. “You know, Aunt Innogen, I think that’d be quite a good idea.”


	21. Wrap Your Arms Around Me

Julian always requested they meet with doctors on Fridays, and Innogen knew both that the reason Friday was preferable to all other days made sense in Julian’s head, and that asking him wouldn’t necessarily help her understand. The first time in the doctor’s office, she’d stood back as Julian asked Doctor Parsons if he might look at the hypospray before the injection. It hadn’t made her anxious or worried; she’d known Julian would come out of the appointment better able to manage himself, or at least start on the right path to doing so. Rather, it was a delicate hollowness she still couldn’t quite put a word to as he’d looked at the device instead of Parsons.

“I suppose you can,” she’d answered, and handed it to him. He’d turned it over in his hands, peering down the barrel like it was a telescope, trading it back to her for the medication itself, which received a similarly thorough scrutiny.

“Is this the full dosage?”

“Depending on how you mean that, yes. Is it the full dosage you’ll receive? It is. Is it typical of the standard prescription for someone on this medication? No. We’re starting you on a reduced amount, with a shorter half-life and reduced dose intervals to better measure your reactions to this particular medication, and adjust as necessary.” Parsons delivered the information like it was the first time she’d ever been asked about it. Innogen hadn’t ever been able to manage that particular trick, no matter how many times she’d been forced to practice.

“How long do these doses last?”

“Two weeks. So we’ll be seeing you back here then, to discuss how it’s working and see what we need to do for the next two weeks.”

“And on and on with that, I expect.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t take long to find what works.”

Julian didn’t quite smile when he handed the medication back. He watched Parsons load it into the hypospray, then blurted out, “Can I do it myself?”

“Legally, I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she said, and pressed the hypospray into his neck, releasing the dose.

They’d come back two weeks later, and two weeks after that, the appointments a new part of their life’s routine – more accurately, a return to old form, as Julian hadn’t needed such regular attention for years now. It took fifteen visits, all told, to find something suitable for him, and pull the regularity of the appointments down to just one a month. They’d needed all those months to find something that Julian said worked, that Innogen _knew_ worked, something that didn’t lead to insomnia and three hours’ sleep a night, or rashes spreading up and down Julian’s chest and arms and neck, or regression to some of the behaviors they were trying to get rid of by the very act of taking the medication to begin with. Even with the settled dose of the proper strain of the right drug providing the stability Julian’s brain needed, Innogen knew it wasn’t the end of it. There wasn’t any way it could be the end so quickly. He’d adjust and they’d have to change it again. Or things around him would change, and it’d need to be altered to help him adjust to things as they were. Even if they brought in routine monitoring of chemical levels, it wouldn’t be as simple as Julian getting a dose every four weeks from now to the end of time.

There was a good deal she couldn’t explain about it, not without Julian’s given permission and consent. But for what she could say, she felt pride swell up and fill her as she described his progress to Muriel and Sol over tea, all the children asleep for the night.

“I haven’t seen him sleeping so well since just after he started swimming and tennis lessons. That’s – just that _alone_ is enough to stop me from giving too much worry to this. He’s not awake too early, or falling asleep too late. He just _goes to sleep_. When he was little, he’d always be getting out of bed and wandering through the house, but then he’d tire himself out from sports and stopped getting up during the night, and now he just – he stays in bed when he’s supposed to be there. And the days, his days are so much easier for us both, and for everyone else. He’s not so easily upset, or so cranky as he sometimes was. Looking back on it, it’s nearly astonishing how much better he’s doing.”

“You too,” Muriel said.

“Me too what?”

“I mean, you too. You’d been looking tired a lot, when we’d talk over the comm instead of just voice-over. Even with that, you’d sounded pretty tired. But, y’know, with him sleeping well and doing better? Trust me, four kids, when Gershon finally started sleeping through the nights, six months after that I felt like a new woman.”

“If you want to get something for a woman who has everything,” Sol smiled and rubbed Muriel’s knee, “get her time. Let her read, and let her sleep.”

“He let me sleep in, took care of getting everyone up and fed for – what was it? Two years? All our children to two years after Gershon was born. More or less. Now that’s a mitzvah.”

“I suppose. No, I don’t suppose. Julian isn’t my child, but raising a child, you know how it is. When they get up, you get up. It’s less sleep, and that’s fine, you can deal with it, but you miss it, and you want it back, and when they sleep then _you_ get to sleep. And it’s so good to rest. For everyone.”

“That’s it precisely,” Sol said, and yawned. “And we should get onto that ourselves. Do you need help turning up the study?”

“No, I can handle that myself.” Even now, fifteen years old, Julian wouldn’t take the study. It couldn’t bother her anymore. She wouldn’t let it, and she could get a decent amount of work done while vacationing when she had a door to close, which was nice. And even after the long day of travel, with ferry delays due to breaks in the weather nets and long-postponed dinners and staying up later than usual to talk, she wasn’t quite ready to sleep, not when she could close the door and be alone for a little while – though with five children and two other adults in the house, all she could do was pretend. Which was still enough.

She was halfway through setting up the bed when she realized she’d forgotten pillows, and had to venture out into the chilly October night to get them, not risking turning on any lights. The most direct route to the closet took her through the living room and back the same way, and it was on the return trip that she stopped by the folded out bed to look and listen. Julian always said he slept well in Lebanon, sometimes better than he did back home in London. He was sleeping well now, curled on his side with the covers pulled tight up to his face with his bear similarly hidden; only the very tips of its ears were visible above the blankets. Even if she couldn’t have seen his face in the low light, only where he was in bed from the general shape of things, she would have been able to tell he was resting well from the sounds he was making, from the dim rhythm of calm, steady breaths.

He rolled over, clutching his bear as he readjusted his position, still deep in sleep, and Innogen pressed a hand to her mouth.

The next morning, he was the first one awake, and just old enough for a cup of morning tea himself – something he had often enough it was slowly changing from a special treat to an everyday necessity. It’d happened to Innogen in university, and when she said that, Julian replied, “Just getting a jump on things,” making Sol and Muriel chuckle.

Talk of university led to talk of school, which led to talk of education, and lessons, and Muriel clicking her tongue in disappointment when she replicated herself a second cup. “I know it’s not something I really should be upset about, I know it’s not my place, but it gets to me, you know? All of my kids take their Hebrew seriously. The kids in Gershon’s classes, it’s like it doesn’t mean anything to them. I’m thinking of putting my name up for next year, see if I can do something to get it into them. They’re not really getting anything – I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just harder to reach kids than it used to be, I don’t –” 

“It’s their parents’ fault.” Everyone turned to look at Julian, who didn’t look up from his oatmeal. “If these children’s parents aren’t giving them any reason to be invested in their education, then they’re not going to put any effort into it themselves. They’re just going to try to learn enough for the bar or bat mitzvahs, and nothing more than that, because if their parents aren’t trying to make them see any importance or purpose to it then they won’t try to learn. Oh, there’ll be some children learning for the sake of learning itself, or some personal drive, but for the most part, it’s the fault of the parents, not the children. If you want them to pay attention to these lessons, then you should start with their parents.”

Innogen was glad she was sitting down. Sol looked like he was, too, and Muriel just shook her head, “You know, I – you know, I can’t argue with that. That’s really – that’s very smart of you, Julian. To say that.”

“Thank you.”

“Right. So – your aunt tells me you’re going to Australia this summer. You’ll be going snorkeling while you’re there? I always hear that’s the best thing to do there.”

“New Zealand, and we will be, yes. I’m looking forward to that.”

“Are you coming back to see us after New Zealand?”

“No, the half term isn’t so long a holiday, so we’re going right home from there.”


	22. The Flag

The ferry ride took them back the way they came, a direct line from Aukland to London that departed well before dawn which, if it’d been missed, would have meant another day in New Zealand. Innogen tried to be generous and tell herself Julian’s detachment from what was around him came from how tired he was, from how early they’d had to wake to arrive at the ferryport and still almost didn’t get there in time. They traveled in silence over Australia and Indonesia, the Bay of Bengal slipped along well beneath the clouds, the equator long gone behind them. Going from one hemisphere to another before lunch was the sort of thing Julian typically commented on with great delight, and now he wasn’t saying anything. He was curled up in his seat, braced against the window, trying to sit as far away from Innogen as he could without leaving the ferry entirely.

“Did you enjoy the holiday?”

“I liked the snorkeling.”

“Was there anything else you liked?”

“I liked seeing everyone in Lebanon again.”

“And was that all?” He hunched his shoulders in, answering just as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud. Innogen waited for him to say something else until they were over Germany, when she finally said, “We could go back in summer.”

“I’d rather not, thank you.”

“It wouldn’t be difficult to arrange. It’d be during a Half Term break, and I could ask for the days for myself. If we’re planning so many months in advance, it’d be easy to ask for specific visiting hours.” He stayed quiet. “I’d think you’d want to go back. I know they told me they –”

“I don’t care what they told you.”

She recoiled at the words, the dull flatness of his tone, quashed her impulse to ask _why don’t you_ to say, “Julian, I know it was hard for you to see them, but it was hard for them to see you, too. Think of how it is for them. It’s been a long time since they were even on Earth at all, and to say they were looking forward to getting home doesn’t say enough, this is what they’d wanted for years, what you’d wanted, and it was you. To see you. So if –”

“They didn’t want to see me.”

“Don’t joke like that. Of course they wanted to see you. I know you’ve read the letters they sent you, I certainly read the letters they sent to me. Think of how long it’s been since you saw them, and tell me you still don’t want to see them again.”

“I don’t want to see them again.”

“If you’re trying to be funny, you can stop that this instant.”

“I don’t want to see them again.”

“Listen to me, Julian, I need you to stop acting like this entire situation doesn’t matter to you. I know you want to see them again, I know they want to see you. I don’t know what the three of you talked about, but I know your parents, and I know they love you, and that –”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No, they don’t love me.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true, Aunt Innogen. They don’t love me.”

“That’s _not_ true. Don’t say that again.”

“They don’t –”

“Stop. _Stop_. I won’t – I won’t have you lie to me, Julian, not now, look at me, no, _look_ at me,” she grabbed his chin and yanked his head around, his eyes going wide and pupils huge, “I won’t sit here and listen to that – that _filth_ come out of your mouth, I won’t hear you speak about your parents like that, not now, not ever, do you hear me, don’t you _ever_ lie to me about a thing like that, Julian, you will _never_ , do you understand?” He nodded, and she let go of his chin, suddenly feeling ill and in need of a long bath and something horrifically alcoholic. “Good. Now. Tell me you understand.”

“I – I understand, Aunt Innogen.”

“All right.”

Flying west instead of east meant they traveled with the sun, so even though they’d begun before dawn, it was only late afternoon when they got back. They took a taxi home from the ferryport, sitting on opposite sides of the cab and looking out the windows at the early evening light sliding along the buildings, saying nothing to each other, only managing a few polite pleasantries at dinner. Tired as she was, Innogen managed to stay awake a few more hours until she could at least pretend she was only going to bed very early, not very late.

Julian had asked that she see his parents first. He hadn’t wanted the four of them in the same room together, and had spent the first of the two days he and Innogen were allowed to visit the prison compound exploring Aukland rather than accompanying her. They’d done their best to be generous and understanding, figuring that one more day wasn’t so much after nine and a half years. Innogen had been thankful for the time alone, at first, the hours they spent walking through the outdoor areas and being shown the gardens and open-air workshops – after close to ten years on Mars they wanted to spend as much time underneath a proper sky as they could, and Innogen had been happy to grant them that request.

She told them New Zealand’s sky wasn’t quite the same blue as England’s, and her brother had smiled, saying that was one thing he hadn’t managed to forget.

The next day, Innogen had chaperoned Julian to the compound and only caught a glimpse of his parents’ waiting faces before the doors closed behind him. When she came back several hours later, thinking she’d waited until the very last moment possible for Julian to leave, he was already waiting out in front for her, giving no explanation why or saying how long he’d been there, no matter how much or what she asked.

Tired as she was from the length of the day, happy as she was to be back in her own bed, sleep was still long in coming. Maybe it had been too much, to hope for some measure of reunification, of the family coming back together, all being forgiven.

When she woke the next morning, she didn’t feel rested, not quite, and knew it would be one of those days there wasn’t enough caffeine in the world to clean up the cobwebs behind her eyes. She made her way downstairs accompanied by a vague sense of feeling strange and out of place, sniffing the air and wondering what Julian had done to the replicator.

Then she glanced out the window, stopped to stare. And tore out to the backyard.

The fire burned happily, _merrily_ , even, along the edges of the paper – of the _letters,_ of Julian’s parents’ letters, their handwriting literally going up in flames, Julian’s parents’ letters to him gone up in smoke –ashes blew skyward on the breeze towards the heavens, the flames working their way inward, surrounding the empty spaces in the letters that had been cut away – the fire consumed everything, inside and out, flames haloing the empty spaces, form and void joining together as they burned, destroyed and gone, finally and for all.

She looked back inside, where Julian was sitting at the breakfast table with his oatmeal and a packet of matches at his side.

He slowly and deliberately turned towards Innogen, his eyes locking to hers, and then went back to his breakfast. Not even looking up as she walked over and stood right next to him.

“Look at me, Julian.” He clenched his jaw and swallowed another bite of oatmeal. “I’m not ready to play right now. I know you’re listening to me. Now, please, look at me so while I’m talking – _goddammit look at me_!” He flinched, and set down his spoon and closed his eyes, but kept facing away from her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled, but please, _consider_ things for a moment, think of what I’ve just seen, why you’d go so far as to burn those –”

“Why don’t you?” Julian said quietly, eyes still closed.

“Why don’t I? Why don’t I _what_ , Julian, tell me what I don’t why, please.” Innogen pulled out a chair and sat down across from him at the table.

“Why don’t you think why I might?”

“Why you might what, why you might burn those?”

“Yes,” he hissed.

“You’re angry and you aren’t thinking clearly. Something set you off, and you’re trying to show me how angry you are, how’s that? We’ve lived together long enough for me to know when you’re angry, for God’s sake, would you just –”

“No.”

“Pardon?”

“ _No._ ”

Innogen grabbed the packet of matches, the half-empty bowl of oatmeal, pulled them aside to clear the space between them. Julian’s eyes were still closed, but he curled his lip at the sounds. “No, _what,_ Julian?”

“No, that isn’t it, Aunt Innogen.”

“Julian, please give me at least partial credit for the benefit of a doubt and consider that I know you well enough to know you’re angry, _anyone_ could see you’re angry right now, and we’re clearly not going to get much done while you’re this angry. So why don’t we –”

“ _No_ , we don’t!” He shouted, slamming his fists down, pulling his face, hissing through his teeth. “No, we’re not, you aren’t going to – you can’t, Aunt Innogen, you _won’t let me,_ I can’t –”

Innogen took a breath and measured her tone, “Why don’t we take a few minutes to calm down. And we can talk when we’re feeling better.”

“Because I’m not _going_ to feel better about this, Aunt Innogen, you know that won’t happen, you _know_ but you’re not letting me, you’d rather I never feel better – you just want me _calm_ right now and you won’t _ask_ for calm because you don’t think, you aren’t wanting – why the _shit_ do you think I burned them, Aunt Innogen, why –”

“Julian!”

“Yes, yes, all right, yes, certainly, I do apologize for my profanity, for the vulgarity, but please consider how this situation does so precisely warrant it, Aunt Innogen, consider the _context_ and how you know it does, you know what they said and what they didn’t, you – I _know_ you do, I don’t see why you _care_ if I burned them when you know –” He shuddered as he spoke, head jerking with his eyes closed, and as Innogen watched, as tightly as he kept them shut, tears started to come as his voice cracked. “And yes, because I know you’ll want to hear it I’ll say it now, yes, I’m sorry for breaking the rule, I’m sorry I went into your office and read their letters to you, but I’m not sorry for it at all, I’m not at all sorry for that, but you aren’t listening, you _won’t hear it,_ I’d say it and say it but you wouldn’t, you won’t let me.”

Innogen drew back in her chair. Julian kept crying. She’d left the door open and the smell of smoke was starting to come into the house, but she didn’t move.

“I’m not sorry for – for – you read them too, you read them first, and they’d been sorry to you, Aunt Innogen, they’d been so sorry to you for all they’d done, for what had happened, but they never once said they were sorry to _me_ , not at all sorry to me, not in anything they ever said to me, they missed me and they wanted to see me but never were sorry to me, they were sorry to you, not sorry to me, and what that means isn’t what they wanted me to hear.” Julian opened his eyes but didn’t look at her as he kept crying. “I read the papers you had. I know what they wanted. I know why they wanted what they did. I know I’m shit, Aunt Innogen –”

“Julian!” She slammed her hand down on the table and they both flinched. “Don’t you dare, don’t you start with that right now, I won’t have you going –”

“Right,” he croaked. “Right, you won’t have it going, of course, right.” He closed his eyes again, and took a deep sigh. “I’m sorry I went into your study, Aunt Innogen, I’ll knock again from now on.”

Innogen didn’t speak as Julian stood up and left the room, just watched him go. She heard him walk up the stairs and close the door, and then she stood, recycled both the oatmeal and matches in the utility replicator, and shut the back door. The fire was on its last flames, and she watched it go to embers and nothing.

“I won’t have you going and calling yourself shit,” she whispered, as the smoke blew away.

Innogen had hoped for some measure of reconciliation, for Julian’s parents words of their desire to reconnect with him to be the truth. Perhaps it had been. She’d wanted it rather badly herself, had held tightly to that hope.

Even now, she still held on.

She didn’t knock on Julian’s bedroom door, but left the door to her study open as a standing invitation. He didn’t take her up on it, didn’t even look her way when he walked past with his lunch and closed his door behind him. Most days she would have told him to eat in the kitchen or not at all. Even when he’d been home from school sick, she’d have him out of bed and eating at the table instead of in his bedroom. But this time, she let it go.

Around seven, she stood outside his closed door. She hesitated, reached for the doorknob, then stopped, hand held in the air – then surged forward, pushed gently, and the door swung open. Julian was sitting beneath the window, reading from a padd underneath the bright strings of fairy lights. The clouds were grey and weary through the glass, and he didn’t look up as she stepped inside, just kept reading.

“Julian.” He didn’t even provide a noncommittal murmur of a greeting. “Julian, I don’t want you calling yourself shit. That’s what I meant earlier. That I won’t have you going and calling yourself shit. Not the rest of it. But that.”

He kept his eyes on his padd, and Innogen was almost ready to speak again when he nearly whispered, “Thank you.”

“Good. I’m glad you understand.” She took a deep breath, and slowly breathed it out. There was more she could say, but there was only one thing she wanted to ask about. “Are you ready for dinner?”

“Yes, I am.”

“All right. Let’s go.” As a treat, she let him order for himself, and he returned the favor by slowing down somewhat, still finishing when she was only halfway through her meal. But she didn’t ask him to stay at the table, let him retreat back to his room because that was where she knew he needed to be. And even though she hesitated in front of his door later that night, even though she still reached out, she pulled her hand back, and walked away.


	23. Never Is Enough

Sunday sunlight came on especially slow in November. There wasn’t anything to be done for it except wait until May came back around again.

Innogen had pulled her hair into a rough-and-tumble messy bun and was arranging the necessary tools out around the sink when Julian knocked on the door. “Aunt Innogen?”

“What is it?”

“May I come in, please?”

“All right.” She watched his reflection open the door and stand at attention, and looked away when his eyes went to the reflections of her own. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“There is something, yes.”

“Go right ahead and ask.”

“Well, I can see you’re already getting it all ready, I mean, it’s Sunday, it’s one of the days you – can you show me how to shave?”

“I thought your grandfather taught you that already.”

“He did. He showed me how to shave my face. He didn’t show me for the rest of my body. Can you help me with that?”

“I don’t see why you need –” Looking back up to his reflection, Innogen saw his gaze hang on her face and stay there a moment before flicking away, only to come back again a moment later. It went away and back again; fighting to stay on her as much as he could manage. Julian held hands together in front and kept his posture tall and firm, the better to look open and friendly, and hadn’t moved from just outside the bathroom door. He had both feet in the hallway, ready to turn around and leave without ever having come inside. She knew he could well take the lessons for how to shave his face and apply them to the rest of his body, and yet here he was, asking her for lessons for something he already knew how to do.

“No, you’re right. I suppose I should. You’re old enough I ought to have shown you how to shave your legs a year ago.”

“Oh – oh, thank you, Aunt Innogen.” Julian’s face burst open, smiling in relief rather than joy. Innogen smiled just as he did, and stepped aside to let him stand by her at the sink. “It’ll be nice to know how to do this for myself, I know I’ve never asked you but just doing it for me – I mean, summer’s not so far off and that’ll be nice, being nice and smooth when it’s hot.”

“Yes, that’s one of the rather nicer things about shaving. Swimming, too.”

“Well, swimming, of _course_ swimming, and a lot of other sports that need you to be smooth, cycling, running, they say every little bit helps.”

“I can imagine it does.”

Innogen started with the legs, walking him through the tools and items, keeping an eye on him at all times, and spun a reasonably truthful explanation about how shaving the face wasn’t quite the same as shaving the rest of the body. She showed him things he already knew, but after the second time of declaring so, he kept himself quiet to better let her lecture and demonstrate. They went through all the steps together: preparing the intended areas, following the curves and the long flat planes of the body, soothing the epidermis after depilation. When she lifted her arm to shave the axillary hair, he copied her exactly, down to cupping his hand around a bun he didn’t have. When they’d finished both patches and had to move onwards, she hesitated long enough for him to notice and ask what was wrong. Since New Zealand, he would always stop to ask what was wrong.

“Nothing. I’m just realizing I don’t have any experience shaving this particular area,” she mimed up and down her chest, around her nipples. “I’d much rather not lead you down to follow any incorrect methods because of my own ignorance.”

“Ah. Well, that’s all right. You’ve already helped me a great deal – I can get a lesson from Cousin Sol for that _particular area._ ”

“Right,” she laughed. “When we next go see them, be sure to mention it.”

“Don’t think I won’t,” he beamed, and stepped back to let her clean up the shavers and oils and creams. Not stepping out or away, not leaving just yet. Julian clasped his hands together in front once again, and said, “There’s one other thing I wanted to talk about.”

“Go right ahead.”

“I’m ready to stop working with Siobhan.”

“What?”

“I’m ready to stop working with Siobhan.”

“That wasn’t a request for you to repeat yourself so I could hear you, that was me wondering why you’d say that.”

“I said it because it’s true.”

“Julian, you love working with her. I know you do. This is a fine joke you’re telling, now, what did you really want to say?”

“I’ve already told you, twice.”

“Just like that? Just stop, right now?”

“Yes, Aunt Innogen.”

“And there’s nothing that’s brought this on.”

“Nothing at all.”

“I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.”

“I am.”

“Then I don’t think you’re telling me the _entire_ truth.”

“What would it matter if I was? I’m ready to stop working with her. Isn’t that enough?”

“No, Julian, it isn’t. It would matter because – you know, no, it doesn’t. You don’t need to say anything. Why bother? Why tell me anything? No, don’t bother with that either, just – we’ll have to talk about it with her when we see her next.”

“All right. I’ll talk with her if that’s what it takes to make you happy about this.”

“I’m not upset about this. I don’t need to be made happy about it.”

“Yes, you do. If you aren’t happy with it, you’re not going to agree to it, and I’ll keep seeing her after I’m ready to stop.”

“If it’s a bad idea for you to stop seeing her, then yes, I’m not going to agree to you stopping.”

“Then I’ll talk with her about it, if that’s going to make you happy.”

“It will.”

“All right.”

Some four days later, after Julian’s private time with Siobhan and some shared time between the three of them, when it was just her and Innogen, she let it pour out. That she thought this was a terrible idea. How she knew Julian was acting out of a reaction to what had happened between him and his parents in New Zealand, not out of genuine desire or need. That there had to be a better way for him to get what he needed than cutting off services in some of his most important years of education, but damned if she knew what that was supposed to be.

“And he admitted, he _admitted_ it, to breaking into my study and reading all the documents – it’s not just that violation of privacy, he’d been doing it for _years_ so I don’t think I’m overreacting to that, I can’t say if burning his parents’ letters, that incident was isolated or not, I hope to God it was but I can’t stop worrying about that just yet, and he wasn’t even _sorry_ for that, and what he wants with you right now, I can’t say what I think to him, not honestly, but he’s had enough of being lied to and I’m doing the best I can to –”

“I know you’re doing all you can for him.” Innogen stopped pacing, having been on her feet since just after Julian had left the room. Siobhan continued, “And I know you only want what’s best for him. I want that, too. Right now, I agree with you that he and I no longer working together is hardly a good idea. But I can’t force him to work with me, if that’s not what he wants.”

“As much as I’m forever indebted to you for everything you’ve done for Julian, would you please get to your bloody point, thank you.”

“The _point_ , Innogen,” Siobhan took off her glasses and began polishing them, “is that we need to find out why this is what Julian wants, and _then_ we can work from there.”

“Did he tell you? I assumed you asked him, but did he tell you? And can you tell me? Does this fall in that tiny grey area where you can tell me what he said?”

“It doesn’t. I’m sorry.” She put them back on. “But he sounded like he’d be willing to tell you the same things he said to me.”

“Wonderful. This is absolutely the most wonderful thing, as though I haven’t yet thought to ask him. Thank you. No, you didn’t deserve that. I’ll get you a better apology later. I don’t like living in this world, and I don’t like it when other people are in here with us.”

“Us?”

“Me and Julian. Our world.”

“Odd choice of words.”

“It doesn’t always feel that way.”

“I can imagine so. Did I ever tell you I wanted to be a geneticist?”

“What? No, I don’t think you ever did.”

“It’s not quite frowned upon, if you say that’s what you want to do. If you want to research purebred dogs, or vanilla orchids. Even if you want to focus on issues with Human-alien hybridization and autoimmune disorders. But if you say you want to be a geneticist and give a general answer such as ‘I’d like to help people’ then there’s a lot of suspicion surrounding that.”

“That’s good to know, if I plan on changing careers.”

“I’m telling you this because I want you to understand why I think it’s important we listen to Julian on this. What I’d wanted to do, for a long time, was be a geneticist. I might as well have said I want to be a butcher. No one needs a butcher anymore, it’s a barbaric thing to say that’s what you want to do with your life. What I wanted was to do something big, something with an impact. Something that I knew would help people. Gene therapy is still available on a case-by-case basis, and to pick one example, no one has died of harlequin-type ichthyosis for close to three centuries. But there’s still so much more we could do, if we’d allow ourselves to move forward out of our past. But I knew that it’d be too difficult to fight the fear of another round of the Eugenics War, not alone, not when I could still find ways to help people. So I came here. To do what I can for others, as best I can, for people I’d like to have helped in that other career I didn’t take. Right now, helping people means helping Julian, and that means finding out why he wants this, and doing what we can to get him where he needs to be.”

Innogen knew Muriel and her family needed access to a butcher. Her whole community relied on their butcher. She raised the animals that gave their lives to provide the parchment for the living Torah scrolls. There were kosher butchers in England, and there was even a ḥalāl butcher in London who provided meat to customers that knew animals should be slaughtered by Human hands. Anyone who wanted meat that didn’t come out of a replicator needed the services of a butcher. There wasn’t any getting around that.

And Julian still needed help. Not the kind of help his parents had wanted given to him; the kind he could get from someone like Siobhan, who had helped him enough he might not even need her anymore.

There was a world of difference between butchering and killing, even in a slaughterhouse.

“I’ll talk to him about it this week. Should we come in next Thursday?”

“I’ll be here.”

Julian usually found train rides soothing; Innogen always guessed it was the large rocking motions of the cars as they sped between stations. It wasn’t the fastest way home, but today it seemed the best. She picked a pair of seats near the back of the car, and once they were on their way, asked Julian if there wasn’t anything he thought Siobhan could still help him with.

“No, I’ll be fine on my own.”

“I’m still worried you’re not going to be. I’d rather know what you think you’ll be doing than not, because maybe if I know, I don’t think I’ll be worrying so much.”

“All right.” He didn’t look at her, keeping his eyes on the darkness outside the windows. “I’m going to be applying to Starfleet Academy, and I’m going to go to Starfleet Medical, and I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Oh.” The shock of it – of both the words and the certainty of Julian’s tone, the knowledge that it wasn’t a possibility but an _eventuality_ – took her a moment to process. “That’s rather more than I was expecting to hear.”

“Everyone tells me I ought to think about my future.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever told me you had any interest in Starfleet.”

“I don’t think it much matters if I did before, because I do now.”

“So – that’s what you want for your future? To be a doctor in Starfleet?”

“I do, yes.” 

“And you don’t see Siobhan being any help at all with any of that.” Maybe it wasn’t fair to hide behind the early lessons she received to keep her thoughts and feelings to herself, to respect boundaries and others’ spaces, to say little unless invited to speak, and she couldn’t think of any other way to talk. Not when something Julian had never spoken about was said with so much certainty she didn’t know if she felt more pride or fear. 

“No, Aunt Innogen, I don’t.”

“We’ll be seeing her next week. The three of us could talk about it a little more then.”

He squirmed in his seat, then settled back down, and in that movement, Innogen saw that Julian thought his applications and chances of getting into Starfleet would be that much stronger if it appeared he’d done it all on his own. That if at the time of his application, he wasn’t working with anyone. How working with someone in the past, and being independent of them now, would make him look like he could handle most anything.

Julian would be graduating in two and a half years. If he could handle the rest of his education alone, then Starfleet wouldn’t seem quite so bad.

True to her word, Siobhan was ready and willing to talk about it with them the following week. And some months after that, at the end of the year’s term, Julian didn’t go so far as to hug Siobhan, but – an action Innogen had protested against that Julian still followed through – gave her a little gift he’d gotten for her. All the better to say good-bye.


	24. Off The Hook

San Francisco was luminous in the nighttime fog, colour and light beneath a hazy, shifting surface, borders between land and ocean blurring into nothingness. From the ferry, Innogen could see the stars as well, and she could almost hear the music she knew ought to be playing at such a sight. Sliding down to the port on Treasure Island took them around the Bay, Oakland on one side and San Francisco on the other, the drivers gregarious and American enough to narrate the landmarks as they flew past and even wishing everyone a good night when they disembarked.

The taxis were comfortably familiar, government-provided service vehicles waiting at the station for whoever needed one. If they’d arrived an hour or two earlier, Innogen knew she and Julian might well have felt up to navigating the local Underground. As it was, they queued up and didn’t have to wait more than two minutes for a taxi to pull up and take them away, off into that luminous city, up and down those magnificently rolling hills, all the way up to what used to be the dead-set center of the city, to where Rupert Peterson and his wife Onatah were waiting for them.

“You didn’t have to hold off on dinner on our account,” Innogen said, grateful they’d waited until she and Julian arrived to keep there from being a fuss.

“It’s really quite all right. We weren’t planning on eating early anyway,” Rupe said, passing her a glass of wine. “You gave us time to get some reading done.”

“What are you reading?” Julian asked.

“Oh? I just started _Inherent War_.”

“Nothing so interesting for me, I’m afraid. I’m working my way through a Gertrude Vicolo collection,” Onatah said, gently flicking her ears as she took a dainty sip of soup. Innogen had only met her twice before, and she hoped she wasn’t reading Onatah’s body language wrong in thinking she was more comfortable than either Innogen or Julian felt.

“I haven’t read her work. What’s it like?”

“Hmm.” Her fuzzy nostrils flared in thought. “Cold. Distant. But very generous with her feelings.”

“I might like that. I’ll keep her name in mind.”

Rupe and Onatah insisted on clearing the table, Onatah’s hooves clicking gently on the hardwood floors. When Innogen and Julian declined the offer of tea, Rupe didn’t press, and simply gave them the little tour they’d skipped in favor of going straight to dinner as soon as their luggage had been set down. From the kitchen and the living room, they made their way through the conch shell of a house to the bathrooms, the guest room, the master bedroom, and the balconies. The house was built into the north face of the hill, allowing them a rather spectacular view of the city no matter how foggy or clear it was. Only the top floor had balconies, each only small enough for two, and Innogen and Onatah found themselves sharing one with Julian and Rupe on the other.

“I always enjoy it when it’s foggy like this,” Onatah said. “So what brought you here, again? Rupe told me you’re looking for a place, but I can’t recall if it was for you or for your nephew.”

“It’s for Julian.” Innogen leaned forward on the railing, bracing herself on her hands. “It’s for him while he’s at school. We’ll be looking at it tomorrow.”

“Ah. Not staying in the dorms, is he?”

“Not for all the years he’s going to be here, no. We talked about it, and decided that it’d be easier for him if he doesn’t have to be moved every year when they shuffle the dorm rooms around.”

“And I take it requisitioning a permanent residence on campus would be too difficult.”

“It seemed a better idea for him to live in the city.”

“I’d hardly begrudge anyone from moving here, if they had the chance. But I freely admit my biases. San Francisco might well be the best place on this planet to not be Human. Though I will admit, Paris does come close.”

“Beirut’s not so bad.”

“Beirut?” Onatah gusted out a laugh, not quite a giggle with how low her voice was. “Beirut.” She laughed again and called to her husband, “Rupe, Innogen says we need to see about Beirut!”

“Did she say why?”

“She said it’s not so bad!”

“You know that means it’s really spectacular?” Julian shouted.

“I’ve been married to an Englishman for the past seven years, I can gather what she meant!”

“All right, just checking for you!”

Not long after that, they all made their way bed, with Innogen taking the living room’s couch and Julian sleeping in the guest bedroom for a change. The curtains didn’t quite block out all the light, not even with the fog; there was still enough general illumination around the city that made it so charming from the sky which, on the ground, Innogen almost thought she’d be able to read something without much trouble. Not a novel, but perhaps a children’s picture book with large-printed letters.

Some things were worse than sleeping where it wasn’t dark enough, but if they weren’t present, then sleeping in a place as dark as it got was best.

If things went well, soon she’d be in the guest bedroom, a room with only a tiny slit of a window and a good deal more darkness, when she came to visit.

The dormitory accommodations provided by Starfleet Academy’s Office of Accommodations and Support were largely for the population of the student body coming from off-planet. They were intended for individuals that needed regulated environments to mimic those of their homeworld. People that breathed water, or corrosive gasses. Who required significantly more or quite a lot less gravity than Earth’s standard at sea level. Or that so happened to be silicone-based and needed to be certain they had a place to sleep they wouldn’t accidentally dissolve midway through the night. They weren’t so much for students who came from Earth, no matter how good their paperwork was or how disabled they happened to be. Julian could well have gotten a single private dormitory room allotted to him, if he and Innogen had wanted to go through the more-than-rigorous process of proving his needs were just as valid as the next student’s. If he’d wanted to argue that he was just as deserving of this particular set of accommodations the Academy was so glad to boast they provided to whoever needed them. It would’ve been possible; they recognized autism as a legitimate Human condition. With Julian’s medical history and documentation and diagnosis, it would’ve been possible.

Somewhere along the line, they’d realized it would actually be less work to get Julian special dispensation to live off-campus. Such dispensation would be something else he’d have to argue for on a regular basis, but the arguments would just consist of reminders and renewals, not fighting the system tooth and nail for the slightest amount of kindness. In the end, getting him the necessary dispensation and permission was something that took even less time than either of them had expected.

Getting Julian permission to live off-campus as a Starfleet Academy cadet was one thing. Finding a place for him to live off-campus in San Francisco was quite another.

When Innogen had moved to London from Guildford, she’d already put her name into the local housing lottery two years earlier, and waited another three more for it to come up. She spent those three years waiting in small apartments, at friends’ flats, a long-term hostel and several girlfriends’ beds until she’d been given a choice of one of six houses, the ones available that most closely fit the qualifications she’d requested in her original application. The house she finally settled on, the one she was living in now and Julian was moving out of, was intended for a small family, but she’d never intended anyone but herself and possibly her wife to live there. That was how Julian would have gotten a place of his own in San Francisco if they’d had another two years to wait. But Academy classes were starting in just a few months, and Julian’s name hadn’t yet been called, and that meant looking towards other means.

Rupe had moved from London to San Francisco four years ago, and Innogen had seen him off to his new firm on good terms. One of his new colleagues had a sister whose wife worked in state housing. In turn, she knew someone at her department who was in touch with someone else that was looking after a property currently occupied by somebody ready to move out who would be fine with letting Julian and Innogen come by one afternoon to take a look around and possibly sign it right over to Julian then and there, if he liked it enough.

That was how things happened when there wasn’t time to wait, or when someone was lucky enough to benefit from knowing enough of the right people to get to the one person they needed most. Innogen had tried explaining the networking chain to Julian on their way to look at the place, and he’d just shook his head amazed, as though he couldn’t believe how that sort of networking could ever happen. She could hardly believe it herself. He looked around at the little flat in much the same sort of amazement, which almost made her happy about this whole adventure because it meant she probably wouldn’t have to pull off that trick twice.

It was small, roughly the size of one of the floors in her house. There were three rooms counting the bathroom, which was tucked out of sight just to the right of the entrance. The bedroom was right ahead of the front door, on the other side of the main living room, which itself had a fair amount of empty space that was currently occupied by the stirred-up paradoxical activity of a life being packed away. It also had a small nook occupied by a desk and computer, with shelves lining the nook’s walls, and right behind that, just past the door to the bathroom, the strangest thing of all: a kitchen. Not a large one, not even half as large as Muriel’s, but with cabinets, a refrigerator, a stove with an oven, a sink, and for all that, it still had a replicator built into the wall.

“It’s an old house for San Francisco. Close to a hundred-fifty years old,” the current resident Daniel explained as Julian picked his way through the boxes and peered into the half-emptied closets. “It was built into the place when it went up, and it’s less floor space but it’s – let me put it this way, the sort of people moving to San Francisco are generally the sort of people who’d use a kitchen.”

“I understand,” Innogen said.

“If you aren’t pressed for time we could get a remodeling crew out here, if you really want the extra space, but – do you?”

“Not particularly,” Julian answered. “It’ll be plenty when all this is gone.”

“I’ve always been pretty glad to have the whole set-up myself. I mean, I pretty much only use the fridge so I don’t have to use the replicator on – just sometimes, it’s nice not to make anything. It’s a good place to keep stuff from the farmer’s markets. Anyway, did you have any –” 

“Having the fridge means you don’t have to use the replicator on Shabbat,” Innogen finished for him.

Daniel did a double-take and burst out smiling, everything about him suddenly relaxed and open, _we’ve never met and I still know you._ “That’s right it there, it’s good for Shabbos. How’d you know?”

“Your mezuzah.”

“God, she was _right_ , this is great, I can’t wait to tell her and see her _face_ – thank you. My mother gave it to me. She helped me put it up when I moved in, what was that, eight years ago? Yeah, eight years ago. She said it’d be good to let people know _without_ letting them know. You know?”

“I know.”

“And she knew! It’s always been really nice to know I never had to make anything _new_ on Shabbos. I mean, I’ve never been all that observant, I haven’t fasted for Yom Kippur in years, but I still don’t like _making_ anything on Shabbos. Just how things go, I guess. So we’ll leave the kitchen as is, perfect. When do you need to be in here? His classes start in September, right?”

“I’ll be ready to move in as soon as you’ve moved out,” Julian called from the bedroom, his hearing still impeccable.

“Really? Just like that?” Daniel’s eyebrows shot up. “Then I might as well not feel so bad about taking as long as I have. When’s the earliest date you want to be in here?”

“July eighteenth.”

“But Academy classes don’t start until September,” Innogen called back.

“I’d like to get used to San Francisco first.”

“If that helps, I’m technically here through September fifteenth. I just wanted to have a reason to get a head start out of here.”

“You’d be missing your birthday in London.”

“I’ll have my birthday wherever I am. That’s how they work.”

“He’s got a point there,” Daniel said.

“I was just thinking about how much you enjoy your birthday. And you’re going off to Starfleet anyway. Won’t you have time for one last birthday back home?”

Julian stood in the doorway of what was going to be his bedroom and looked at Innogen, crossing his arms in front, then clasping his hands together. “Aunt Innogen, if you want me to stay at home for a while longer, then please just say as much. I know you’re going to miss me, and I’m going to miss you, too. But I’d appreciate it if you’d be honest about whether or not you want me to move, and when, instead of pushing and pulling like that.”

Daniel looked between Julian and Innogen. “And he’s eighteen?”

“Seventeen for another month and a half,” Julian corrected.

“Smart kid you raised.”

“He’s not my – sorry. I mean to say, thank you. And Julian, yes, I would like you to spend as much time with me as you can, before your classes start. But if this is what you want, then –”

“It is, Aunt Innogen.”

“Then, unless you come home to London for your birthday, I suppose that’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, _thank you!_ ”

“I’d like to at least wait until August first, as a compromise.”

“And you couldn’t have lead with that? It’s fine, I’m all right with that. August first’s a good day for it.”

“I’m fine with then,” Daniel said.

“Splendid,” Innogen said.

“I’ll be taking the mezuzah with me, but I can help you put up another one, if you want.”

“Thank you, but I’ll be quite all right,” Julian said.

“Hey, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you going to the Academy for?”

“Medicine. I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Yeah? Why a doctor?”

“I think I’d be good at it,” he said, rather quickly – one of the stock answers he gave to that and similar questions, something Innogen knew he’d thought of and practiced well ahead of time. She’d done the same when people began asking her why she wanted to devote her life to graphic design, or didn’t want children, or didn’t want someone to come home with her even when that was where they wanted to go.

It wouldn’t be long before she’d need to practice a new set of things to say.

Packing up Julian’s room went reasonably well, for all that they only left themselves a fortnight for everything. They began with the nonessentials and moved from there, paring down as they went. Detritus of hobbies, accumulation of interests, much of which neither of them cared to remember, not even for the sake of a laugh. Innogen claimed a few of his school assignments for her own archives, and he laughed at the joke. They finally swept up some of the shelves and windowsills, years of dust only disturbed by passing breezes, because there wasn’t any way Julian was having the order of the pebbles and leaves and stones and shells disrupted by any other person. Much of his winter clothes could simply be recycled, since San Francisco never saw snow.

Innogen didn’t say anything about what she had hoped to find.

Instead, she found a box of gloves at the back of his closet. A box full of the gloves he’d chased after and insisted on keeping, something he’d kept up for nearly twelve years and only recently given up pursuing. With a mismatched pair in hand, she looked up at him from the floor and finally asked, “Why was collecting these so important to you?” 

That was what got him to laugh at last, smiling and shaking his head. He sat down on the floor with her, and took out a solitary one for himself, a grey one, with ornamental fabric buttons affixed along the outer seam. While he ran his thumb over them, he said, “I thought that if I found one missing glove, then eventually I’d find the other one and be able to make a matching pair. It always made sense – I’d find one, and because it was lost, then clearly the other one would’ve been tossed aside as well after the owner realized what had happened. So all I’d need to do was keep looking, and I’d find the second half of the pair. I knew I’d make a match eventually, if I’d just found the right one. Of course, now I know if anyone found they were missing a glove, they’d simply recycle the leftover half, or replicate another to replace the one they’d lost.”

It was simply perfectly Julian. He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, not straight-on like he did when he was forcing himself, and it was still more eye contact than he’d ever been able to manage in the years before he’d begun living with medication. Innogen reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. He didn’t startle or jump, only kept fondling the glove that had been in his hopeful care for however long it’d been, and smiled when she squeezed him gently.

“Why don’t you put these with the rest of the winter clothes.”

“You know, Aunt Innogen, I think I will.”

Daniel was both practical enough to leave a good deal of his furniture behind for Julian’s use instead of trying to pack it up and move it himself – the desk, the table, his nightstand, a standing chest of drawers – and kind enough to call the depot himself to make sure his old bed would be picked up and a new one delivered on the proper day so Innogen and Julian wouldn’t have to do it themselves. With everything else packed away in his truck or waiting inside the apartment, the three of them were waiting for the depot’s deliverymen, drinking American lemonade made from soil-grown lemons while sitting on folding chairs out on the sidewalk during one of San Francisco’s treasured bright and sunny summer days. They waved at pedestrians and cars going past, and mostly chatted as they hurried up and waited.

“How does the sunlight in America compare to England?” Daniel asked.

“There’s more of it,” Innogen said.

“It depends on where you are in America,” Julian said. “But yes. For the most part, there’s more of it.”

“London to San Francisco, then. To be more precise.”

Julian took a long drink, then replied, “When you have it, it’s more intense. You’re closer to the equator, so the wavelength through the atmosphere is slightly different – it’s enough that the sky doesn’t look quite the same.”

“Really?”

“It’s a different blue there.”

“If I ever go, I’ll look for that. I can’t make it out there right now, not with everything I’ve got waiting for me after all this,” he gestured behind them towards his apartment and pointed his cup of lemonade at his truck, “but after all that, when I’m settled down, I might head out to London. Where should I go?” Julian just laughed. “What? Is that a really stupid question?”

“No, no. Not at all. It’s just as broad a question as what’s the sunlight like in England,” Julian said.

“Okay, then – you guys have to go to Golden Gate Park sometime, and when you do, you’ve got to pack a lunch and just wander around for a while. There’s the zoo, the reptile house is great, and all the art museums, of course. And there’s this little crepes place on Clement, called Clementine’s –”

“Clementine’s on Clement.” Innogen chuckled.

“I think it’s so you don’t forget. Anyway. They make it all by hand, everything, and it’s worth the line. I’ve been four times, I just ask them to surprise me, and trust me, I got surprised. So what should I see in London?”

“Hyde Park,” Julian said without hesitating. “All the art museums, of course.”

“Of course,” Daniel said.

“Pack a lunch and walk on the Thames,” Innogen told him. “You could take a boat ride along with the rest of the tourists, if you want to see something far away from where you’re going to be staying, or just see more of it. Take a day trip out of London. Take at least one, and go to something _properly_ old. The chalk horses, or Stonehenge.”

“We’ve got old things in America.”

“The land is old, I’ll grant you that. Some of the land’s older than the land in England. But the things from people, practically all of them were razed when the Europeans came over.” She took a sip and smacked her lips to punctuate her declaration. “Like I said. Properly old.”

Daniel leaned back and laughed. “Never argue history with the English.”

“Damn right,” she said, and Julian smiled with his eyes closed, facing up towards the sun.

“America and England aren’t as old as Lebanon,” he said.

“Well, sure,” Daniel replied, “but that’s _Lebanon._ ”

The depot’s van came soon after that, and Daniel’s old bed was disassembled and removed and the new one brought inside piece by piece and assembled in the same spot previously occupied, with only a few minutes in between that Julian insisted on, in order for him to properly hoover the floor. When it was all done, every phase of the removal, the delivery van gone, there was only one thing Daniel had left to do before he could leave. From a respectful distance, Innogen and Julian watched as he took a small screwdriver, and carefully and deliberately, even reverently, took down his mezuzah. He kissed his fingers and pressed them to it before he took it down, wrapping it in a white cloth and placing it in a small wooden box for safe transportation – the first thing in, the last thing out. Daniel stepped aside to let Innogen and Julian put up the mezuzah Sol and Muriel had sent him to celebrate living in his own place.

Innogen doubted they’d have put it up if Daniel hadn’t had one there first. It was still a lovely sight, just the same.

Daniel waved to them from the truck, and they watched him drive off, down the street and around the corner, and when he was out of sight, Julian turned to Innogen and deadpanned, “That bed’s not going to make itself.”

That evening, when Julian was finally as moved in as they could manage before Innogen had to leave for the night, they’d gotten the bed set up, with the mattress in place and the sheets tucked tight, and his bear at its customary place of honor on top of the pillows. There were boxes to be unpacked and art to be hung and far too much to do, but Innogen still had four days before she had to be back in London and they could stop for the night. She looked around and smiled at the progress they’d already made. “You’re taking this a lot better than I’d thought you might.”

“How so?”

“It’s that this is the first time you’ve made a big move to someplace new, and I’d just thought –”

“Second.”

“Pardon?”

“This is the second time I’ve made a big move to someplace new.” He turned away, looking at the sunlight slanting gently through the window.

“Oh.” She nodded. “I – I suppose that it is, then.” Innogen rubbed her hands together, hesitated, then took a step closer to Julian and stopped. There wasn’t much of anything that she could see on his face, or in his shoulders, just that he was trying to hold himself very still, and that itself meant something. “I really don’t think we should just replicate our first meal in your new apartment. And I know it’s too late to try for one of the nicer restaurants around here, but Daniel did tell us there was a Chinese place a few streets –”

“That sounds perfect.” Julian was practically at the door by the end of the sentence. “Chinese sounds like it’d do very nicely right about now, did he say where it was? What the cross street was?”

“I think we can find it if we look hard enough.”

They didn’t find exactly what they were looking for, ending up in a ramen noodle parlor after almost a half-hour of walking around without being quite certain what it was they were looking for and finally settling on a place that served handmade food with a fast-moving line, which Innogen guessed befitted the cuisine. When they got to the bar, Julian grinned, leaned forward, and said, “Surprise me,” which won him an identical grin from the chef. 

Innogen just ordered the vegetable bowl and a pot of tea.

It was exactly what they’d needed, warm broth and slick noodles, coddled eggs bursting into golden stars the moment they were pierced, hatching little suns as they were stirred into the broth. Julian investigated his bowl’s mystery ingredients with careful nibbles and gentle bites, setting some aside and eating the rest, but still notably willing to try all of them. He and Innogen happily traded tastes, whether it was a spoonful of broth or a bite of mushroom or Julian not-so-stealthily fostering off a slick piece of lotus heart. The sign by the door listed the provinciality and origin of most of the items, with a few – like the secrets of their broth – only listed with cheerfully obfuscating details. Innogen poured tea for them both, a green tea with a smooth, rich bitterness that tasted exactly how she felt some hours later, when she bid Julian good-night and good-bye together for the first time since he’d come to live with her in London, so many years ago. She didn’t want to think how long it’d been, not when she asked him for a hug and he gave it to her, and even turned his head to allow her to plant a kiss on his cheek.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Sleep well, Aunt Innogen,” he said, words that weren’t _I love you_ but held the same meaning. It was too far to walk from Julian’s apartment to Rupe’s house and Innogen walked it just the same, the better to empty her head and heart so she could sleep when she finally arrived in the guest bedroom, a room just as dark as she’d hoped it’d be. The next morning, Onatah didn’t say anything about how late Innogen had gotten in, just flicked her ears once and said she’d happily schedule her a taxicab from the dispatch if she thought she might need one that night.

“I think I’ll be all right, if I leave earlier tonight. But that’s very kind of you to think of me.”

“It’s no trouble. Though, and I beg you to please not be offended, understand I myself would be if you so happen to even hint of thinking of staying in a hotel rather than our house when you come to visit your nephew. And while I love my husband, and respect his native culture, this is only my first cup of tea this morning and I’d rather not get into the fine English art of refusal arguments. They need to wait until lunchtime at the earliest.”

“By all means.”

Julian’s apartment went up easily enough over the next few days, one box at a time methodically ripped to shreds and deposited in the replicator for more efficient recycling. The building had a laundry room tucked around the hallway from Julian’s apartment, complete with a utility replicator, and together they ran a load of laundry and replicated a pair of toothbrushes to ease Julian into the processes. There wasn’t time to see any sights and there wasn’t time to be sorry about it.

Finally, almost too early for it to rightly be called morning, she kissed Julian good-bye and tried not to cry when she turned around and got into the taxicab. She glanced back as it pulled away to look at Julian for as long as she could – as he stood there, waving from the sidewalk, waiting for her to disappear, she couldn’t stop the tears. Innogen wiped them away and kept her eyes on him until the taxi turned the corner and it was Julian who disappeared. The sun came up as she was driven through the city, over and out, from Julian’s apartment in Parkside to the ferry depot on Treasure Island. It stood across the water from the old Ferry Building, no longer in service to the vehicles that gave it its name – there were so few water ferries left in the world, air ferries now the commonplace ones, but there was one out on the Bay, not quite sailing but still graceful on the water. Innogen did her best to nap on the six-hour journey from San Francisco to London; from there, it was another taxi ride taken in silence back to her house. The sun was low in the sky and on its way to setting. It was the middle of the day in San Francisco and just early evening in London, and she knew Julian would have quite liked that.

The house smelled fine, and as she shut the door behind her she realized she’d expected it to smell different, a particular quality to the air suddenly absent, but it was just the same as it always was – as it would be from now on. She’d forgotten to get anything to eat before the ferry ride, and there hadn’t been any replicators onboard, so she made herself an early dinner and ate her stew and drank her tea as she watched the light go out of the day. Then she made another cup of tea she took to her study, deliberately not looking towards what had been Julian’s room and would go back to being the guest bedroom, as it’d been before he’d arrived, as she went up the stairs.

Innogen had given notice for her absence months in advance, and settled all her current projects to a point that the rest of the team could finish them fine, or at least let her leave them until she got back. Everyone knew not to call while she’d be gone, not if they wanted or expected an immediate response. One of the benefits of management that nobody had told her about was that she didn’t need to answer anyone until she was ready, and right now that wouldn’t be at least until tomorrow.

She kept sorting through the messages that’d accumulated on the days she’d spent on the other side of the world, few of them of any genuine importance. There were reports from work, and a note from Julian letting her know he was doing all right. And there was one from Muriel. Innogen expected it to be full of questions about Julian’s move and how it had gone and whether or not they’d hung the mezuzah, not sparse words that did nothing more than deliver information so bluntly Innogen had to stand up and step away for a moment.

_We took Rebekah to a doctor to make sure. I was wrong. You were right. I’m sorry. – Muriel_

As world-shattering pieces of news went, it wasn’t the worst she’d ever received. It wasn’t even particularly unexpected, not compared to some other things she’d heard that broke her life in two. She read it again, and as she walked up the stairs to her bedroom, she realized she’d more or less been waiting to receive that specific piece of news ever since she’d met Rebekah. 

But all Innogen could feel was sorrow that Muriel and Sol had waited so long for their daughter. It meant Rebekah had known there was something terrible about herself without ever knowing there was a name for it, and that was as much a hell as Innogen could imagine for anyone. She knew not being able to put a name to something meant giving it control and power, that it meant there was no way to live _with_ it, just live in fear of it. Rebekah, who carefully played alone all by herself, who’d never quite been able to put her words together inside her head in such a way as to be happy with them when they came out of her mouth, who struggled to manage to pretend she was the daughter her parents expected of her and wanted her to be.

Julian had never been the son his parents had wanted of him. He’d fought himself to be that expected child, and he had failed, and it hadn’t been enough for his parents, but that fight had been enough for Muriel and Sol.

For some feeling she couldn’t quite put a name to, closing the door behind her to an empty house and sitting on her bed and staring out the window over the street, Innogen thought about her mother. How she’d once gotten into a shouting match with her father after they’d re-painted their bedroom about the placement of a simple bedside table, something Innogen had seen as nothing more than frustration over the whole endeavor leaking out over that particular object. But she’d been just as careful about everything else in their house, about as much of her life as she’d been able to keep under her control. She’d clung to her routines and schedules, and shortly before she’d passed, had told Innogen how she’d always used them to keep her fears and worries about the world she lived in as something she could maintain. Her father had been similarly exacting about the plans he made for his life. Not so much for day-to-day scheduling, but when it came time to take a holiday, his schedule was ironclad – whenever he ventured outside of the little bubble of home and Guildford, he had to do as much research as he could, exhausting every possibility, planning everything practically to the minute. Armoring himself against the chance of something unexpected ever happening to him.

As she got up and began pacing, her brother came to mind, how he’d always chased one project after another but had never managed to settle down onto any single one of them and see it through to the end, not by himself, not without help. He’d never asked for such help and it’d never been granted, but he’d needed it so badly, he’d needed it just as badly as their mother had and hadn’t ever quite been able to manage it alone. His wife, who was so quiet and shy she’d seemed exactly the proper sort of Sudanese wife, who had always been a light sleeper even inside her own home. Innogen left her bedroom and walked down the stairs and out the back door, and remembered how Julian’s mother held her hands so carefully, so as not to shake them or move them in any way that wasn’t right and proper. Her shy smile when she told Innogen how much she liked living in England, because nobody in England tried to touch her. It had once seemed very contradictory that for all she’d loathed fleeting touches across her body, she was always happy to embrace someone to hold them tight.

Innogen had often thought having something to strive for, a goal she could name and call her own, was all that had kept her from turning out as her brother had. She’d held that goal since she was eight, refining and focusing it through the years and keeping it as clear as she could. Knowing how easy it would be to fall away from what she’d set out on and lead an aimless life instead only made her work harder to keep herself on track. It’d been easier than she’d thought it would be; it didn’t usually take much to remind her what set her mind humming and her heart shining, no matter how tired her head and hands were.

One of the things that had first attracted her to design work was the idea that great design, perfect design, was something no one had to think about. Something someone could simply pick up and use. She’d always had to think about what other people might say or do or think, more than what she knew other people did, and from there design had called.

Outside in the backyard, she looked up at the night sky, turning around and around and staring into the bright darkness. It was nearly bright enough to see the spot on the bricks where Julian had burned his parents’ letters that hadn’t ever quite managed to wash away in the rain. And just there, no matter how dark it was, Innogen could always see where Julian stood and cried because it hadn’t been dark enough in his room for him to fall asleep.

What she remembered most clearly about her grandmother was how her hands had shaken up beside her face when she was excited. She still kept in touch with a cousin on her mother’s side who’d never quite mastered the art of social graces and hid behind comedy, and another who hid behind isolation. All the relatives, up and down, through the generations, because these things were supposed to gallop through families, and gallop it did, all the way through to her, through to Rebekah.

And to Julian.


	25. Baby Seat

When Innogen had shared the news about Julian’s acceptance into Starfleet Academy, she’d had wall-to-wall congratulations for nearly two whole days. It’d been overwhelming at first, then embarrassing, and by the third hour, she realized the support it gave her: that everyone who had seen someone else off to adulthood was welcoming her into their ranks with open arms. At least, with arms as open as the English could get. It was only Chedosi who went so far as to offer her a hug.

Because it was Chedosi, Innogen had accepted it gladly.

She’d let everyone know where she was going, and why, well before she and Julian had begun packing up his room. That news didn’t bring her the same intensity of well-wishes, but when she returned, it was to a different sort of benediction, one she accepted with as much grace as she could gather. But there was joy to it as well, one which she couldn’t wrap her mind around, only glimpse around the corners and by the edges of her thoughts.

Before she’d left, she’d let herself think that even in the middle of all of it, after her life had been thrown backwards, upside-down, and inside-out, she might be offered something besides kind words and sympathy. An act, an honest gesture, their hands reaching out to hers in some form or another. But she was so deep within herself, she almost didn’t recognize it when it came.

She’d been sitting with her lunch in the pantry cataloging the ways she wouldn’t have Julian in her life anymore when, out of nowhere, Kubiryaba slammed her own tray down on the table and knocked Innogen out of her own head, then sat down and declared in her smooth Bromley vowels, “We should go dancing.”

“Excuse me, we should what?”

“Go dancing. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, whenever you’re free. We should do it. Let me know what’s good for you and I’ll make sure I can go.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just not quite sure what this is.”

“It’s nothing.” Kubiryaba took a sip of milk, something that was back in vogue for young people to drink. “It’s just an offer to go out dancing. Nothing more than that. I’m not trying to be anything but a friend to you right now. And I know friends take friends out dancing when they need cheering up.”

Innogen laughed and looked away. “You’re being serious about this?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“My God, I haven’t gone dancing in ages.” She looked back to Kubiryaba, deliberately. “First, thank you. No one’s offered to take me out dancing in any way, in a long time, especially not just as a friend. And I appreciate that, very much. But I can’t say yes. I would love to, absolutely, but – you see, with me on the partner track, and you, still relatively new, it wouldn’t –” 

“Screaming of workplace favoritism. Everyone’s got to stay on their own seniority level.” Kubiryaba let out a sigh. “I understand.”

“I’m not finished.” That made her sit up in surprise. “Going out dancing with you would be – however it’d be. But you’re right that I could use some friendly company. Just something not quite so…so _potent_ as dancing.”

“A museum, then.”

“Yes.”

The Victoria and Albert had a new clothing and costume exhibition opening a few weeks away, and when that happened, there’d be a small group from the agency going out to see it – to admire the craft, to practice sketching, to make a day of the museum itself. It was something for Innogen to look forward to, a way to get to better know some of the other agency staff.

And that Saturday night, she took herself out dancing.

It’d been long enough she’d had to look up where the good clubs were instead of asking around or hanging out in one of the seedier ones and hearing where everyone ought to go next time. She almost would have felt embarrassed by it, if she hadn’t been alone. If she’d been with someone, she might well have been, and laughed it away. But she’d been alone, so she’d just smiled, and did her best to dress without looking like she was trying too hard, or trying to not look like she was trying, eventually settling on something lightweight with a low waist and a hem that spun so entertainingly when she practiced twirling around her bedroom, black on black with black flower patterns giving the eyes something to hold onto instead of sliding over everything and away.

In the dim light of the dance club, it played off her hair beautifully. They’d let her in though she could tell how crowded it was, let her in with just a smile and a promise all she wanted to do was dance, and it had been the truth when she’d stood outside, and now that she was in, she couldn’t make herself do more than stand at the edge of the dance floor and look out over it.

She didn’t know anyone and no one knew her, and that was just as much for the best. It meant she got to stare and stare to her heart’s content, look out over the crowd and not worry about seeming out of place because she knew she was, absolutely, and that there wouldn’t be any consequences to not quite fitting in, not tonight and not tomorrow. She was dressing the part to fit in without any trouble, that much she had going for herself. The rest of it, the _fitting into the crowd_ part, she didn’t feel herself capable of quite yet.

Innogen knew she never really had been. That she’d been forgiven that, for being young and beautiful, mostly just young. Tonight, she knew she wasn’t. There were young women and men – girls and boys – walking in and melting right into the crowds, the crowd of nearly everyone their age, and they looked the age she’d been when Julian had come into her life, nearly twelve years ago. 

All she’d wanted then was to go out dancing. And here she was, out dancing.

She walked into the crowd, tried and managed to move and sway with everyone else, losing herself to the feeling of bodies, of sounds that went past her ears and to her bones, the smell of handmade drinks and the taste of the promise of tomorrows in the air. And she stopped, letting everything flow around her. The people danced, the band played, the club filled her head full to bursting as it always did – and her heart was untouched, full of light and air, someplace beyond the world around her.

Nothing she had lost was worth mourning. None of it at all.

Innogen closed her eyes, and opened herself to the music.


	26. Home

Innogen’s university experience had been the Royal College of Art, whose three terms a year didn’t at all resemble Starfleet Academy’s two semesters – but as Julian explained, even though there were fewer breaks, they lasted longer. 

However many respites from classwork he received, and however long they lasted, she would have liked to see Julian use at least part of one to come home. It’d hardly be a major inconvenience. Cadets were allotted enough transporter credits each year he could come by for tea twice a week, slide right across the world to knock on the front door and bypass the ferryports entirely to return to his own apartment without having to book the trips weeks in advance. But he stubbornly remained in San Francisco, always refusing her invitations and offers.

At least he had the grace to not offer excuses. He would always cite a specific reason for why he had to stay in San Francisco: classwork and errands, reading to be done, a desire to get to know the new city he was in, a wish to eat what he had in his refrigerator before it went bad and he had to recycle it. Orientation outings to get to know San Francisco with his classmates and extracurricular activities while he still had the time for them were hardly his attempts to escape their conversations. The fifteen kilometers and hour’s minimum travel between his apartment and the Academy meant it was easier for him to spend the entirety of his school days on campus, something both of them agreed was a genuinely reasonable trade-off for not having to live there. 

It was when Innogen suggested alternatives that he’d dig in his heels and explain why he couldn’t shuffle his schedule around without preparation, how even with advance notice there wasn’t enough time for him to get away. An hour or two just wouldn’t be enough for either of them, so there wasn’t any point in continuing with asking him to come to London when he wasn’t going to be in a position to answer positively for a good long while.

Midway through October, she finally gave up.

It wasn’t hard to find out what he was eating, what he thought of his teachers, how he was coping with a new system of public transportation options – which was less a matter of taking a bus instead of an underground train and more there not being any school-supplied guides on the protocol for how to exit and enter the vehicles, something he seethed about for almost five minutes over the comm while Innogen sat back and listened, unhappy with his anger and comforted to be confided in.

At first she’d thought of sending him paper-and-ink letters, but only her time would be wasted if he didn’t want to read them. She told him keeping up the habit of handwriting was more a matter of maintaining a workplace eccentricity, something her recent promotion meant she could absolutely get away with, but the levity was lost on him.

“Of course I’d want to read your letters, Aunt Innogen. I’d make the time for them if I had to.”

Innogen smiled, not quite feeling it. “As long as we’re talking about mail, is there anything you’d like me to send to you?”

He hesitated a moment, long enough for Innogen to know there was something he might want, before going all open smiles. “Not that I can think of. But if there is, I’ll let you know right away.”

“Thank you.”

To Innogen’s surprise, enough time made itself available to Julian – not to come home in the weeks he had off from classes, but that he could compose a six-page letter and however many hours he’d spent researching how to use the postal system. When she called him to talk about it, after nearly a week of not speaking thanks to one thing and another and a great big push to finish a hotel redesign before the new year rolled over, the relief of seeing his face threw the questions she’d prepared about the letter’s contents out the window and instead she asked him why he’d finally decided to hand-write a letter to her.

“I was just thinking how it’s getting on through December, and then I realized it was almost time for the Yule Address. It’d really snuck up on me this year, what with me being in America and all, since there aren’t so many Yule traditions in San Francisco – except they call it Christmas over here in America, which I knew but it keeps surprising me. In any case, it all made me think about how we’d used to watch the Address together, and how nice that always was, so I thought this year it’d also be nice for me to write to you, because as long as I’m lingering on childhood nostalgia I might as well try something I know is going to make you happy as a result of it.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Did you like it this year?”

“Like what?”

“The Address. I thought the Duchess pushed a little too much on the whole subject of exotic pets, but I did like what she said about heritage breeds. It seemed a bit –”

“I thought you didn’t watch the Address.”

“I admit I haven’t in the past few years, but that doesn’t mean I can’t.”

“It’s just that…you really made a _point_ of not watching it. I’d turn it on and you’d leave the room.”

“Yes, I remember,” he blushed and looked away.

“So it’s not that I don’t like seeing you enjoy it. I always love watching it, and I’m happy we both watched it this year. I suppose I just want to know why you decided to.”

“Well, I suppose it was that – it wasn’t that I’ve always secretly wanted to and thought I shouldn’t because even though we don’t celebrate Yule ourselves to begin with, it was that – it was more that it’s something people do in _England_ , not America, and it felt like a nice way to have a bit of England in San Francisco for an afternoon. It’s that _not_ watching it in England was a way to be observant but watching it _here_ was a way to be English, and I hope that makes sense.”

“It does, yes, quite well,” Innogen said, trying to keep from smiling too hard at how deftly he could use his words. “So – what _do_ they do for Yule in America, besides calling it Christmas?”

“Oh. They sometimes do quite a lot, actually. They decorate trees, and the emphasis is more on the community you’re within at the given time of the celebration rather than the boundaries of family. Still big feasts, of course. A couple of my classmates went to Saint Ignatius on the night of it, which, _Christ’s mass_ , no one thinks of it quite like that unless they plan on going.”

“No, of course not.” Innogen nodded, he continued, and she settled in to listen.


	27. If I Had $1000000

There was enough open space in Julian’s apartment that someone could comfortably sleep on an air mattress in his living room, but that was something which Innogen knew would never come to pass: she’d said, once, she might sleep in his apartment when she came to visit and the way he’d nearly climbed backwards out of his chair made her immediately retract the statement. Rupe and Onatah were always happy to have her for a while, even for as long as a week in June, especially with the implicit permission her presence gave them to finally let themselves be tourists provided she came along too. It was much easier for everyone, and given the bed in their guest bedroom compared to a replicated air mattress, much more comfortable as well.

She just couldn’t shake the idea it’d have been nice to spend at least one night at Julian’s.

It was easy enough to push it aside when she saw him waiting at the ferry terminal, all smiles – even if he was in the most garish shirt she’d ever seen anyone wear on or off a theatre stage. Her eyes almost hurt just looking at it: an eight-pointed rainbow star comprised of the entirety of the visible spectrum bursting out of the center of his chest and rippling over the rest of his torso, some of the colours doubling and repeating, the geometric and even nature of the pattern at complete odds with the riot of colours. She did her best to be circumspect about asking him where it had come from as they boarded the water taxi to take them to the Ferry Building.

“Oh, do you like it?”

“It’s certainly very…bold in its design.”

“I know, isn’t it nice? I have a sundress like this, too. It’s traditional Californian craft. There was a festival on campus celebrating California from the last ice age to the present and there were all sorts of things, food demonstrations and wildlife shows and crafting booths. This was one of the things we could make, mostly shirts with some other things, socks and hats, all sorts of clothes. See how it feels, here.” He thrust a corner of it at her which she rubbed between her fingers. “The fabric’s replicated, but it’s such still a nice weave – I think that’s the term for it. Whatever makes the fabric have this texture.”

“Weaving, yes. And you’re right, that does feel nice.” She wasn’t sure if she felt up to asking about what the dress looked like, and was more than grateful when the taxi hit the mainland. From there, they caught a trolley that slid gracefully along its rails without any concern for gravity or inclines, and took a short walk up the hill to Rupe and Onatah’s house. Everything was on the table ready and waiting for them, and they welcomed Innogen to their home and city with gentle hugs, the first she’d yet received. Julian tended to save his for farewells. Innogen had just enough time to deposit her luggage in the guest room before they all sat down to eat.

“So tell me. How’s the old firm doing? I’ve been following it on the news, don’t worry about that, but it hardly gives me the inside scoop about how things are really going on inside.” 

“There’s nothing I feel worth complaining about. Well, I finally broke down and hired a personal assistant two months ago, and after a week I realized I should have hired him two years ago. I thought he might only have wanted the job to give him a better foothold of living in the city, but he’s so very good at what he does, organizing my meetings for me and helping me manage appointments and scutwork, I almost feel like I should get him something from San Francisco while I’m here.”

“There’s always chocolate.”

“And whiskey,” Julian said. “San Francisco produces some excellent single malts.”

Onatah’s ears stood straight up, and Innogen held back a giggle so she could ask, “And how did you happen to learn that? Was someone handing out samples at that craft fair?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. I’d just been doing some reading about San Francisco, and I came across an interesting note that in the major twentieth-century earthquake, one of the local distilleries didn’t burn down in the subsequent fires and it hasn’t ever stopped producing. I had a free Saturday afternoon, so I went on a tour, and while it doesn’t produce quite what I myself would order if I wanted a drink, I don’t know what your secretary would enjoy so he might well order it himself. Do you know what he likes?”

“I’ll be sure to pay attention at the next staff party.”

“This is Anchor you’re talking about, in Potrero Hill?” Rupe asked.

“That’s the one.”

“Innogen, their rum is well worth the trouble of bringing home with you. If they don’t have any bottles left, sign up for one from the next available batch. No, sign up for two. And Julian, I didn’t know that about the earthquake, thank you for telling us about that.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll keep it in mind as a possibility,” Innogen said. “Did you have fun on that tour?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Did you bring anyone with you?”

“No. Why would I?”

“I’m just curious, that’s all.” 

“You sound disappointed,” Julian said.

“I do? I’m sorry. I must be more tired than I thought. Nobody here will mind if I go to bed around eight, will they?”

“Not in the least, if you need the sleep,” Onatah said.

“I’ll just go back to my apartment after this, then.”

“So soon? At least stay for some tea,” Rupe said.

“All right. I’ll stay for tea.”

Innogen had been honest about needing some sleep; she’d been lying about not being disappointed. She happily closed the door to the guest bedroom behind her and flopped down onto the bed at eight-thirty, staring up at the patterns on the ceiling in the dark. It would have been nice if Julian had taken someone with him to the distillery instead of just going alone. As much as she knew it was his choice to do so, his own free time to spend as he liked, she still hoped to hear about him sharing it with someone, any sort of someone, no matter how ordinary or significant or special they were, so long as it was _someone_. He’d had so few friends in school, even fewer after he stopped working with Siobhan – Innogen still hoped he’d find at least some friendly acquaintances here in San Francisco, hoped so much.

To Julian’s credit, he hadn’t gone so far as to lie to her about needing time to adjust to life in San Francisco. Two years was sufficient enough time to adjust to a new living space and properly settle into it.

The last of the boxes were gone, with everything either in its proper place or out of sight. There was finally art on his walls: two rather colourful abstract pieces that could be meadows or clouds or simply colours which both managed far more restraint and taste than any of his shirts, and a more realistic portrait of a woman facing away from them that she’d seen him linger beside when they’d visited the modern art museum.

There was also a small decoration hanging on a chain in a window that Innogen lingered beside, flowers and grasses set between two plates of glass with a cut prism dangling beneath that she couldn’t resist the temptation to reach out and touch, making it swing about – and when it did, she couldn’t resist a smile. “Another piece of traditional Californian craftwork?” Beneath it was a new collection of small objects, twigs, leaves, pebbles and lost things with dust layered thick around.

“Yes, I got it a few months ago at a large street fair – I’d just wandered through, and there it was. I spent a fair amount of time trying to settle on a single piece. These are all native wildflowers, not just to the Bay Area but all of California, the golden poppy’s the central focus for that reason. They told me – oh, while the glass is replicated at present they’re working on sourcing it handmade, and if they can’t find any soon they’ll be looking into making it themselves.”

“Do you remember anything about this street fair?” From where she stood and the angle of the open door, she could about peer into his bedroom, just enough to see that the floor was clean and his bed was made with his bear in its proper place.

“Just that it takes place in May near Castro Street.”

“I’ll have to remember that. Thank you.” She turned to face him. “So where did you plan for us to go today?”

“Mostly just the farmers’ market. I have to go there anyway, and unless you came here years ago without telling me I don’t think you’ve ever been. I’d like you to see it sometime, and since I need to pick up some orders, I thought we could go together.”

“Then we’ll go there to start.”

“We’ll have to come right back, though, so if there’s anything you’d like to see straight-away, we could move the market to the afternoon.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“All right, then.” She recycled her teacup as Julian got his shoes on and collected some glass bottles that he arranged carefully in a shoulder bag. 

It took two bus transfers and a short walk to get from Julian’s apartment to the Ferry Building, with Julian talking and Innogen listening to what he was saying as much as what he wasn’t. He talked about his classes, his teachers, his classmates, but mostly about the city itself and Starfleet Academy’s campus. She nodded as he lectured her about the birds and toads and snakes that lived in the headlands and sometimes made it as far as the quadrangle, and it took two bus stops for him to exhaust everything he knew about butterfly migratory patterns. Innogen prodded him as gently as she could to try to direct the conversation to places that would tell her more of what she wanted to hear, unpleasant as it was to find out he was unhappy with his classmates and despite numerous attempts – many of them joyful for other reasons, such as his garish tie-dyed shirt – he hadn’t yet managed to integrate himself into the greater student community. Living off-campus contributed somewhat, but that wasn’t worth giving up to simply make some temporary friends. Julian thought of everyone in the Academy as temporary in his life, including his teachers, which he rationalized with the idea that since everyone was going to disperse in a few years to fleet ships and starbases and other planets, there wasn’t a point or any purpose to doing more than simply being cordial to each other. He was learning how to live on his own, he was learning the city on his own, he was learning to be alone, and he was sleeping and eating fine and doing well enough in his classes to stay in the top five percent without much effort, and that also drove a wedge between him and the other students. To that, Innogen couldn’t tell if he was unhappy about it and was trying not to be, or was genuinely unbothered by it.

Just as she was gathering her thoughts on how she might talk to Julian about being social while seeming circumspect, the Ferry Building swung into view and he sat up ramrod straight in excitement. They couldn’t get there fast enough, and nobody was leaving the bus fast enough; he pushed through the crowds and didn’t look back for Innogen until he was off and away.

She’d seen the sign for it from the water the day before, but the pictures provided hadn’t given her an accurate idea of what it look like once it arrived – all the crowds of a train at rush hour and none of the queueing. Travelers and tourists made their way past the dedicated customers of merchants and their wares, everyone jostling past everyone else, no order or sense to any of it whatsoever. Smells and sounds and sights hit her one after another, the June sunlight dazzling on the water and moreso in her eyes, and she followed close behind, calling his name, until he finally pulled himself to a stop beside the front door of the building. 

“Stop, stop! Julian, _stop_. I’m tired from traveling, I don’t know where you’re taking me or what you want to show me, I’d be more than happy to let you be my tour guide but for now, just a moment, please, _stop._ ”

“Oh.” He looked away. “I’m sorry, Aunt Innogen.”

“Thank you. Was there something specific you want to show me, or are we just going through to your normal market route?”

“Just the normal market route. There’s a couple of stands I need to get to, because I have some orders I need to pick up this week.”

“In that case, how about we get onto those?”

“All right. The first one is just up this way.”

He didn’t say anything more as he led her through the stalls, not even pointing out things which made him do a double-take for reasons Innogen could only guess – possibly something coming in early or late in the season, potentially an entirely new variety of plum or nectarine, the smell of bread that made him lose his pace and made her want to stay and linger on as well to better eat that aroma – until he stopped at a stall suddenly enough she nearly ran into him. She nearly couldn’t believe it when he smiled at the woman behind the table and told her, “I wasn’t expecting you today.”

The woman smiled in return. “It’s nice to see you too.”

“You weren’t here last time. The other person here, I’m sorry I don’t remember his name, he said you were out with some illness. I take it you’re feeling better? Better enough to be here, I can see that, but really, how are you doing today?”

“Pretty nice, thank you. It was my father-in-law who was covering the last couple of weeks. Me, I’ve been – I wasn’t that sick but I was sick enough to not want to be here and get worse, so I just sort of, you know, moved slowly and drank a lot of tea.”

“Camellia sinesis, absolutely beautiful drink. But then, I’d know.”

“Of course you would,” she laughed.

“How’s your morning back been coming along?” 

“It’s been a good one. I had a new coffee shop come by for milk pickup before the market opened, which is always good, they definitely keep the cows happy –”

“Right, you were saying that the restaurant, Prime Meridian, that’s it, that it dropped its old one, so that’s good for you too, then.” 

“Yeah, we won’t have to re-plan our production line for next season, and we’re thinking of expanding it a little, too. Don’t worry, your yogurt’s safe.”

“Ah, excellent! I managed to hold out on blazing through the last batch I got, I’ve still got half a jar in my fridge, but here are the rest.”

“Do you just need a refill?”

“Please.”

“All right. Just sign here.” She handed Julian a padd, and he tabbed through the pages to get to a calendar where he selected a date to enter his name and an amount, marking his claim with his initials and a thumbprint, then scrolled back to note he was picking up the share of yogurt he’d already signed up for. He gave the padd back along with the empty bottles from his bag. “Thanks. I’ll go get your order out of the truck, just give me a minute.”

“Thank you. But before you do, I want you to meet my aunt Innogen. She’s visiting from England, so if she seems a little shy, it’s not just because she’s English, it’s also because she’s tired.”

“I’ll be gentle. So you’re the famous aunt Innogen?”

“Famous?”

“He’s mentioned you a couple times.”

“Then in that case I suppose I am, yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise.” She held out her hand and Innogen shook it as gently as she thought would be polite. A moment later, the merchant disappeared back into the truck behind the booth, and came out with four jars Julian maneuvered into his shoulder bag. They all bid each other good-bye, and Innogen and Julian were off to pick up his next order.

“That was pleasant,” she said as they passed a four-armed street musician playing beneath a palm tree, in the shadow of a stall selling shimmering handmade fabrics.

“I always like it when she’s there.”

“Yes, the two of you seemed very friendly.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call her my _friend_ , Aunt Innogen, but yes, I’d say we’re quite friendly. I’m glad you got to meet her.”

“Julian, if I can ask – I didn’t catch her name, and it’d be a little odd to go back just to ask.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”

“I – you don’t know that?”

“I’ve really got no idea. I’ve never had reason to ask her.” He glanced at Innogen. “Should I ask her? At this point, admitting I don’t know it might be odd. But she doesn’t know mine, either. So isn’t it all right neither of us knows the other’s name?”

“Generally when people get familiar enough to have that sort of conversation you just had with her, once you reach that kind of familiarity, then names are allowed.”

“I suppose.” He smiled at a sample display of heirloom plums – just a few baskets’ worth; just enough to let people passing by take a piece of fruit or two or even three if they were feeling gluttonous to get a taste of the farm’s production and see if they wanted to sign up to receive more than just a few at a later date. “But I don’t see why I need to learn it at all. It’d be nice, but I know her, she knows me, we see each other at the same place at the same time every week, so why would I need to remember her name when she’s always right there?”

“Unless she’s out sick.”

“Right, unless she’s out sick,” he said. Rather dismissively, too – strongly enough Innogen knew the comments had simply rolled off his back. He might come back to them later, and he might not. It wasn’t something she wanted to worry about right now, and she did her best to keep it out of her mind as they walked through the market, stopping at booths for nectarines and nameless but intimate conversations, a small bag of lemons and a couple of limes, a basket of blueberries, and finally at a small cart near the edge of the market where they picked up the last things on Julian’s list: a small bouquet of flowers.

“What are those for?”

“To look nice.”

Back in his apartment, as soon as the yogurt was safe and cool in the fridge and the fruit properly stored as needed, he replicated a small vase filled with water and a suspended soil substitution from the laundry room. Innogen watched him arrange the flowers carefully, turning the vase around to get a look from every angle, the end result a reasonably well-balanced composition if still fairly chaotic in terms of components.

“So what are you going to make with all these, then?” Innogen pointed at the lemons waiting on the counter.

“Just lemonade.”

“It’s going to make an awful lot of lemonade.”

“I’m happy to drink it.”

Julian’s kitchen was far more full-service than hers back home, but lemonade seemed more or less the full extent of his cooking abilities – slice the fruit, squeeze the flesh, strain the juice and stir it with replicated sugar syrup and carbonated water, it was more mixing than cooking. Innogen still praised it like it was the most elaborate wedding cake she’d ever had the privilege to taste. The muddled blueberries were a nice touch.

“So is there anything you’d like for lunch? The replicator’s got all the standard options, of course. I downloaded the new recipe bundle Corynn Tan released last month, and I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of her slow-cooked tomato sauce, although I like a more even ratio of sauce to pasta than the standard recipe calls for, which is just enough to coat the pasta, but you can get it however you like. Would you like some? Or are you in more of a sandwich mood?”

“I haven’t had a chance to try anything of hers lately. I’ll have it by the standard variation.”

“Splendid.”

It was a sauce worth the legal hassle of securing replicator rights management for access to the recipe bundle. Eating off plates that made her smile to recognition of her old craftwork, Julian gobbled his pasta down rather more neatly than Innogen thought he would have managed and a little more slowly than she’d expected, but after how he’d eaten dinner at a reasonable pace last night she might well have taken that as precedent. He’d surprised her then, eating dinner at Rupe and Onatah’s house, going slowly enough he finished around the same time Innogen did, accomplishing the minor miracle by serving himself only one dish at a time, and now, with only one dish to eat, he repeated the feat by putting his utensils down in between bites, deliberately slowing the process. It was smart of him, figuring out how to find ways to work around being autistic. And it left him his hands free as well, the better for him when he needed to emphasize something in the conversation.

“So,” Innogen said as she cleared the table, “Tomorrow we’re going on that Sanctuary District tour Onatah mentioned last night, but I take it you’re still not interested?”

“Not particularly. It’s my laundry and errands day.”

“All right. Are you still meeting us for dinner at Hsiang’s?”

“I never said I wasn’t. Yes, yes, Aunt Innogen, I’m coming.”

That afternoon was spent around Pine Lake Park, watching the birds on top of the water and the fish underneath the surface and the children on the lawns chasing after their dogs with their parents in turn chasing after them, the breezes turning sharp when the air shifted to start coming in off the Pacific. Julian took in everything, whether it was a tiny spider climbing up a reed or a massive heron suddenly making a lunge on its dinner. Innogen did her best to use everything as a distraction to keep him from realizing he was talking about what he hadn’t yet been willing to mention.

Certain core requirements he was putting off until his third and fourth years, depending on how much time he wanted to push them away or when he simply wanted to get them over with for the sake of graduation. History, literature, fine arts, those would come after he’d finished the requirements for Starfleet Medical and some highly suggested electives besides. He’d taken senior courses as a freshman and he’d be taking freshman courses as a senior, and maybe it would be strange and maybe it wouldn’t, but that wouldn’t matter because once he got to Starfleet Medical he’d be following along with everyone else.

“That’s closer to how it was for me,” Innogen said as they began walking back to his apartment. “I didn’t take any literature requirements – there was an ‘art in literature’ class as a mid-term elective, but I didn’t take it. So I suppose if you want my experiences on being in a more focused educational setting, which might help you some with Starfleet Medical, then that I can share.”

“If I need help with it, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

 _No, you won’t._ “I’m glad to hear that, Julian. Thank you.”

The next morning, she and Rupe and Onatah kept to the back of the tour group so Onatah didn’t block anyone’s view, and Innogen spent more time looking at the houses and the sky than listening to their guide talk about the history of the place where they were walking. She knew the Bell Riots were important, and how three hundred years was long enough for anything to have some age to it. The problem was more that it felt so disconnected from the San Francisco she was experiencing. If the buildings hadn’t been ripped down for something new to take their place, they’d been gutted and redesigned from the inside out. Families still lived here, but they lived here by choice now. For the delight of saying they lived in a former Sanctuary District. Innogen knew she hadn’t quite been steeling herself to see the sick and the homeless and the dying out on the front stoops of fancy row houses to add a veneer of realism, or a perfunctory nod towards verisimilitude. She still felt like something besides a plaque would fit the place better. Provide some sense of the continuity of the place.

She didn’t say a thing about it to anyone, not even over lunch out at a little retro-style replimat looking across the East Bay. Instead, she pushed her focus onto the food and the company, and asked her hosts how often Julian ate dinner at their house. He’d been instructed that it wasn’t imposing for him to come over, not even if he didn’t call ahead of time, and that he was in fact _encouraged_ to come over if he wanted; if it would be a bad time for him to be there then they’d let him know unambiguously. It had seemed to get through.

“He comes over often enough, I suppose,” Rupe said. “Twice a month, usually. Why aren’t you asking him about this?”

“Because if I want a clear idea of how things are going for Julian, I can’t only ask him. I need more to go on than that.”

“Eminently understandable. He’s always very pleasant, and truth be told, it’s nice to have someone young in the house. We’re not quite ready to go to Starfleet Medical ourselves and volunteer for clinical trials, but –”

“There are some days it seems like a very good idea,” Onatah said.

“Many days, really.”

“Most.”

“I know, my darling,” he said, putting his hand over hers.

“And Julian?”

“Oh, yes, Julian.”

“I might suggest – what might work to keep him coming over more often than twice a month at most would be to make it a standing invitation. Opt-out rather than opt-in. It’d be a better way to see him in your house more.”

“Is there a day we should suggest, to make it easier for him to agree to the arrangement?”

“No. Well, yes. What you should do is suggest a day, and then ask if there’s something else that would fit better with his homework and classes. Make the offer, but let him adjust it as he needs to. It’s important to balance boundaries and control without leaving either behind.”

“Innogen, when we do have children, I expect to receive lessons in proper parenting from you.”

“Thank you, Rupe, but I don’t know how much of my experiences with Julian are applicable to what you’re talking about.”

“I’d think there are some universals to all children, no matter what their species,” Onatah said. “You’ve given him a good home, love, support, encouragement – there are those who’d deny children that, on an individual and cultural basis, and they’re not the sort I’d truck with.”

“Truck with?” Innogen asked.

“It’s an American idiom. It means you wouldn’t want to have any dealing with them, you want nothing to do with them whatsoever,” Rupe explained. “It paints quite the visual picture.”

“It rather does.”

Looking at Anchor’s trucks a few days later – the day after she and Julian had wandered the Legion of Honor to their heart’s content and the last day before she had to go back to London – helped give her a better idea of the phrase’s meaning. Some things had to be taken at a literal level to be understood, from letting cats out of bags to keeping a tight rein to something going up in smoke. Not trucking with someone to mean to not do business with them, to not want to share one’s time with another as one _trucked_ – which itself followed the long American tradition of turning a noun into a verb – long distances with precious cargo. It was a phrase she might do well to remember for herself.

She didn’t say any of that to Julian, who was more interested in asking their tour guide about the differences between the ingredients and chemical reactions and processes which made up of Anchor’s products. He looked almost possessed, so eager to please, concentrating hard on asking the correct questions to impress their guide. Her return performance was equally admirable, enthusiastically patient and helpful, and Innogen guessed this sort of interrogative tourist was preferable to one happy to assume they knew more than she did. Innogen didn’t listen with as much focus as Julian, tuning in and out, generally more interested in the sight of the great pieces of machinery and the way it all looked like a children’s playground or a movie set of a fantasy wizard’s laboratory. The beauty of it was that when she happened to tune in, learning what everything was and how it all worked didn’t break the illusion or the wonder.

At the end of the tour, everyone in the group was provided with a collection of small tasting bottles, fifty milliliters each of a half-dozen of the distillery’s offerings, selected randomly for each guest. Julian was lucky enough to get two of the whiskies, and Innogen was more than a little delighted to get the dark rum.

“What are you going to do with yours? I’m not sure what – that is, I wouldn’t want to presume, but…” she hesitated. “It’s that I don’t know the precise medication you’re taking, and how that might interact with these. And I’m not sure how –”

“Don’t worry about it, Aunt Innogen. I’ll be fine if I drink these. Not all of them at once, of course, but over a month or so, I expect I’ll be all right.” 

“Right, yes.”

“I’ll save the bottles, too. I doubt I could put flowers in them, but they’ll still look nice on the windowsills.”

“Well-earned trophies?” Innogen teased.

“No, just pretty glass bottles,” Julian said.

“Ah. Of course.”

From Potrero Hill, it wasn’t a long walk to their final destination of the night and Innogen’s holiday: a California cuisine restaurant focusing on local, handmade food that boasted an impressive cocktail menu. They read the names aloud to each other, tasting the sounds – _Mystic Treehouse, Hollywoodland, Burn Unit, Fame and Fortune, Hope and Glory_. Finally, after they settled down and their server arrived, Innogen ordered a Gingersnap and Julian, equally shy and defiant, asked for a Central Valley Bellini, one of the restaurant’s signature offerings. It changed seasonally, sometimes weekly, depending on the fruit: persimmons in winter gave way to berries in spring, peaches in summer and citrus in autumn. This week, on account of the chef wanting to try something different and one of their supplying orchards surprising them with twenty baskets’ worth, it was sour cherries. On his insistence, Innogen took a sip, and when she was finished with her Gingersnap, ordered one for herself.

“May I also have a Snow Goose?” He asked their server Margot.

“Julian, I’d rather you didn’t – you just had a drink,” Innogen said.

“As did you.”

“Yes, but I’ve been drinking longer than you have, and I don’t think this is an unjustified worry.”

“All right. Margot, could I have a Snow Goose with dessert, provided my aunt approves?”

“Do you?” She smirked at Innogen.

“By the time we have dessert, I will.”

Innogen knew they might have to call a taxi for Julian to get back to his apartment, and watched him carefully throughout dinner for any sign that he’d need one. He seemed to do well enough that her worries didn’t appear necessary; one drink was fine, and even after he had his Snow Goose, beaming and gushing over how good the plum flavor was, he kept up with the conversation, enunciated clearly, and if his movements were a little more disjointed in places and more fluid in others, he made his way to the restroom and back without stumbling or falling, holding himself as steadily as he could.

It felt good to wait for their food, to get a little drunk together. The importance of the rite of passage wasn’t lost to Julian, who very clearly understood.

“You seem to be handling all this very well,” she said, waving her hand at the glasses on the table.

She’d anticipated a number of reactions, none of them Julian bursting out into laughter – deep, honest laughter that couldn’t be faked, laughing over something that she didn’t grasp could be seen as funny at all. “Handling all this very well,” he echoed when he’d calmed down. “Thank you, Aunt Innogen, but – I mean, really, I spend so much time thinking about all this, all the how to move and how to stand and how to talk, I spend so much time thinking about it when I’m _sober_ , so why should it matter if I happen to be drunk?”


	28. Life, In A Nutshell

After the distillery tour, Innogen found herself looking up Bay Area events and landmarks, sightseeing tours and special trips. Not even necessarily to forward them to Julian, though most were sent his way; mostly to imagine what they might do if they had the time for all of them, instead of just a handful. He’d write back, let her know what he thought of everything, but when he sent her the proposed itinerary for her next visit, what he suggested was something that had somehow slipped out her net.

“How did you manage to learn about this, anyway?” Innogen glanced at Julian, whose eyes were locked on the tall ships ready to set sail. She’d done enough research to recognize the _Dauntless_ from the _Interceptor_ and the navy from the pirates, and to know to take the anti-nausea medication at least an hour before she’d need it.

“I read about it on campus from some posters on the quadrangle’s public boards and outside the student’s café. It sounded like so much fun I made the reservations that night, just in case you were able to make it for the summer vacation – holiday, the summer holiday. And here we are, and don’t worry, if you hadn’t been able to come our places would’ve gone to someone on the standby list and I’d have found us another battle somewhere else. There’s also Sausalito.” 

“It can’t be as nice as this,” she said, as the crews took their places for the show to come.

Then they were walking down the pier and up the gangplank onto the _Interceptor_ , where everyone but the main crew was swaying, just a bit, getting used to standing and moving on a rolling surface that wasn’t always in the same place between one footstep and the next. She spun around and caught herself, feeling almost like she was dancing in a club again, and made her way to Julian’s side, standing up at the bow, as close as he could get to riding on the figurehead without leaving the deck. He was trying to hold back a smile, his whole face twitching with delight, and she ran her hands through her hair and shivered at the breezes, cool from the water. From here, she could see all the way to the East Bay, up through Oakland, the ancient shipyards of Alameda and the mountains far beyond that. The sky was lightly dusted with clouds and the sun was bright and strong, with the wind angry enough to make Innogen squint against the salt in the air.

“Do you think they coordinate with the local weather administration to make sure they always have sunny days?” She asked.

“I don’t think the weather bureau manages to be that precise. I think it’s more likely they – ah, well, they might know someone at the office, everyone seems to know everyone else in San Francisco.” 

“And you’re speaking from experience,” she joked lightly.

“That I am,” he said, teasing her right back.

They turned around at the captain’s call, watched her leap down from the rigging in a move she must have practiced a hundred thousand times to land perfectly on her toes and begin pacing the deck, setting everyone to task like she’d just stepped out of a classic swashbuckling movie – dressed to the nines for the part with her buckles and sashes, hats and boots and a bandolier, and a wicked smile that more than anything else told Innogen they were in for a good time.

“And _away we go!_ ” the captain cried, and they were off, pushed away from the dock with everyone cheering, the rocking of the boat suddenly given a direction to follow and with it a new opportunity to learn how to walk. On an ordinary day, Innogen would tell Julian he shouldn’t be laughing at three people falling off their feet to land flat on their faces, but given the circumstances of how she laughed right along with him – and how they laughed when they got back up – she let it pass.

They’d be on the water for nearly two hours before the battle itself went underway, two hours of slow, wind-powered sailing around San Francisco Bay and its islands, of a crash course in sailing tall ships and the proper songs to sing while flying from the rigging. They waved at the surfers and swimmers on the Bay, mock-saluted at Starfleet Academy, and called out greetings to the seagulls and sea lions and their future enemies while things were still amicable between the two crews. Julian had packed Mission-style burritos for lunch, all the better to eat one-handed in order to leave another free to do the waving. People tried to make the crew break character and none of them managed to do so, not even the young girl who tried so desperately to convince them there were sea monsters on board the vessel, which to be fair could have been easy as nearly a quarter of the guests and three of the crew weren’t Human, including the girl herself, but the sailor laughed, “You’re part of the crew, that’s all what matters!”

“They’re so charming at that age,” Innogen said dryly, wiping some salsa off her cheek.

“You know, I’m really quite looking forward to pediatric medicine.”

“Are you planning in specializing in that?” Innogen asked as she got to her feet.

“I doubt I will. But it should be fun, just the same. The classes I had this last semester were a lot of fun, too. The literature core requirement class was more fun than I’d thought it’d be. We read –”

“I’m relieved to hear that putting it off as long as possible was actually a good idea.”

“Aunt Innogen, _please_.” He pouted a moment, then huffed rather pointedly and rallied himself to continue. “It was fun, and I enjoyed the discussions. We read a dozen books, one a week, and that might sound like a lot but it really wasn’t. Three were from Humans, and the rest were from other species. Some of them I liked more than others, of course. There were nine novels, a poetry collection, an autobiography and a short story collection. I had a hard time getting into about half of it, but I think I could appreciate most of it if I went back, not that I’d particularly like to. It covered going from the early twenty-first century to just a couple of years ago with the poetry. That was one of the ones where our teacher said that – oh, poetry is an art of getting the words right.” He forced the words out of his nose in what Innogen knew was a splendidly accurate recreation of his teacher’s accent and cadence without ever having heard it firsthand.

“Which of the novels did you like most?” Activity began sweeping up as they geared in for the battle. The crew got into places, and a few shanghaied guests followed in step right behind them.

He paused a moment. “I think it’d be _Urge for Going_. I don’t know if you’d like it. It was very _sorrowful_ , but also very gentle, which is nice when that can manage to work but I don’t know if that’s quite for you. For the rest of them – I know I have a little time for reading right now, but I won’t for much longer, so I’m glad I forced myself to do some reading while I could. Having the class helped. It was…”

“Yes?” There was more shouting for everyone to get to places, and Innogen and Julian made their way down the deck to the masts.

“It was just that, I didn’t have quite so much trouble with some of the readings as everyone else, when by all rights I should have had _more_ trouble. One of the Human novels, _Percival_ , had a scene where two characters were practically ripping each other’s heads off, and there – did you ever read that one?”

“Oh, my God, ages ago. When I was your age, when it was almost new. I remember loving it, but nothing much else.”

“Do you remember –”

“ _All hands, all hands, turn her ‘round and get to stations!_ ”

Julian whipped his head around to the captain behind the wheel, then turned back to Innogen. “Do you remember the fight scene about two-thirds of the way through, when Percival and Reyes were having that argument about children, and Jonathan was there but not saying anything?”

“Not well.”

“I was the only one who raised my hand and suggested it was because of how Jonathan was tired of playing mediator and wanted them to solve it between each other that time. It didn’t work, but that was what he wanted, and nobody else thought of that, even though the teacher said that was the author’s intention. There was another book we read, actually set in England, that –”

And then _BOOM!_ went the cannons and _BANG!_ went the enemy’s return fire and _FA-OOSH!_ went the sails as they swung around for another volley, Innogen’s ears ringing as her feet went out from under her as everyone screamed and slid, the only way she managed to stay upright was grabbing onto the rigging right beside her head, and Julian grabbed onto his own section of it but he hadn’t needed to, all he’d done was spin around on his heel like nothing at all had happened and his eyes were to the sky and he was laughing, deep full joyful laughs like there was nothing better in the world than to have a cannon shot at the ship he was sailing on.

He swung around on the rigging to face Innogen, still all smiles, and without giving any thought to the cannon-fire except to speak louder, tell her he’d explain more of the novel later when the battle was over and done, and Innogen watched in astonishment when he let go of the rope and ran to the edge of the deck, to whatever the little fence was called to lean over and shout at the enemy ship along with everyone else who had strong enough sea legs to do more than cling to masts or rigging. Innogen didn’t leave the grip of the rigging the whole of the battle, as the ships danced on the water, and Julian threw himself into the dancing as best he could, not making any mind to the sights or the sound or the not-quite-false dangers – just in the moment, as he was.

Back on the dock, he only needed two steps to readjust to solid ground, while most everyone else wobbled far onto land.

They sat in a booth near the back of a nearby restaurant, by a big curving window that gave them a good view of the water where they’d been sailing. At Innogen’s prompting, they picked up the conversation right where they’d left off before Julian had run to join the battle. It sounded like a rather depressing novel, but Julian insisted it wasn’t.

“It was that – well, it was the first book we read because it was written the earliest, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, right before the third world war. I liked that it was set in England, and I liked that used a very narrow focus to talk about bigger things. After I finished it I did some reading about the author’s life. Rowling never wrote an autobiography but there were a lot of interviews I went through, and I thought it was fascinating how she talked about wanting to write children’s books.”

“She did?”

“Yes. And her writing’s lovely, she wrote children and teenagers quite well, I think she absolutely could have. But in her interviews, especially the ones from the end of her life, she had this one where she said she’d wanted nothing more than to write children’s books when she was younger and almost did, but the world she lived in meant there wasn’t any place for them, not anymore. That she’d wanted to, but couldn’t. That struck me as the most sorrowful thing about her. I kept thinking, maybe she never allowed herself that chance, maybe there wasn’t a place for them but she might have been able to make one. I’m not sure. But for what I know about the time when she was writing, sometimes if I think about that world, I can understand.” He blinked, then pressed his chin against his hands with his elbows on the table, staring out at nothing. Finally he said, very quietly, “I’m glad we don’t live in that world anymore.”

Innogen couldn’t think of anything sufficient enough for a response; even voicing her own honest agreement seemed like it would sound hollow. Maybe it was the light on his face, or the way he held his shoulders in tight, or how tired they both were from all the hours on the water in the sun; whatever it was hit Innogen hard, all at once, to make her see just how much older Julian was than when she’d seen him last. Childhood was supposed to be full of changes, and Julian’s had been, and fiercely. Six months wasn’t supposed to be so much for adults. But if she was thinking of Julian as _adult_ , she knew something big had changed.

So she said nothing, and soon enough their food arrived. After they’d each taken a few bites, she deliberately broke the silence, asking Julian whether he’d pursue any extracurricular activities and if he thought he’d have time for them.

“I thought I’d said. I’m sorry I didn’t. I’ve joined the racquetball club, and I’ve been practicing with them regularly, twice a week now, since about February. It’s on campus, so that means twice a week I don’t get back home until well past ten, sometimes eleven, but I think that’s just good practice for being a doctor – although one of the women who’s graduating next semester says, oh, she says it’d be better practice to pack a change of clothes and sleep on campus somewhere.” He grinned. “I’m not quite ready for _that_ much practice.”

“Try the third floor of the library.”

“What?”

“Remember the tour we took, the orientation tour that took us all over campus? The third floor of the library had those wonderful deep window seats in the art books’ room. There were even cushions on them. If you have to sleep on campus, that’s one of the best sort of places to do it. Hide in one of the corners, take out a huge monograph to make it look like you’re studying, and you’ll get a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep.”

“Aunt Innogen, might you be speaking from experience?”

“I might,” she said, and they both laughed.


	29. The King of Bedside Manor

If Julian had a chance to nap in the library, he didn’t say in his letters. Even though she wanted to, Innogen didn’t press, just waited until she finally had a chance. After she arrived two hours early, after collecting her visitor’s pass, as soon as she stepped the Starfleet Academy campus she was off the library and the beautiful art books’ room. The monographs were a fantastic reminder of why books would never go entirely digital, not when there wasn’t any way to replicate the lushness of the colours or the texture of the ink under her fingers on a padd’s flat screen. She bent her face and inhaled between the pages, deeply, with a tingle going up her spine; she’d always loved that smell, clean and deep and earthy all at once. Finding books she could take home with her that had that smell was always a triumph.

After she slid it back into place, Innogen curled up in one of the window seat corners, back against the wall and face against the glass – thin, smooth, sturdy glass, cool and flat against her cheek. She sighed, relaxing, and didn’t even try to stop smiling.

When she didn’t have time to spare, just time to wait, she made her way to where Julian said would be best for them to meet: just at the edge of the quad, on one of the long slab benches underneath the cypress trees. She sat down and immediately stood back up, the bench too cold with all the fog blowing about. When he came by, he let her give him a kiss and they were off towards the shuttle pick-up.

“I wasn’t expecting you here so early.”

“Neither was I, but there was a tail-wind over Iowa, and that brought us in a little faster than we’d thought. Don’t worry, I just waited in the library.”

“Always plenty to do in the library. Did you see the gallery on the ground floor?”

“I think I missed that.” She’d taken a good twenty minutes lingering there. “Should we go see it?”

“We could right now, if you’d like. It’s a student photography exhibit, all undergrad work, all amateur, of course, but it still might possibly be up to your standards.”

“Why don’t you show me, then. There’s going to be another shuttle soon enough after this one.”

“Then right this way, please.” They turned around and headed back the way she’d come. There were a good number of students still out, occupying the liminal window of time between afternoon and evening class sessions. Most of them were minding their own business, but the one that they passed who turned around and called out to them made Innogen curious for reasons beyond her friendliness towards Julian and being a species she couldn’t identify.

Julian seemed unconcerned with the fact that she was in a wheelchair. “Hello, Melora. It’s nice to see you.”

“Yeah, you too. How’re you doing?”

“Oh, quite well, really, all things considered, especially with my aunt visiting – ah, Aunt Innogen, this is Melora Palzar, Melora, this is my aunt Innogen.”

“Nice to meet you.” She held out a hand, and Innogen shook it gently.

“Likewise.”

“We’re just on our way to see the student photography in the library. But I take it you were heading someplace else?”

“Yeah, just back to my dorm. It’s been a long day, and –”

“You could use a bath?” They both laughed at what was clearly a shared joke between friends.

“Pretty much, that. Nice to see you, nice to meet you, talk to you later, have a good night.”

“That does about cover all of it. Take care,” Julian said. Innogen waved as Melora turned and left, and the two of them resumed their walk to the library.

“Who was that?” 

“Melora. She’s a good friend of mine.”

“Is she in Starfleet Med as well?” Innogen asked, forcing her words light.

“Oh, no, she’s studying to be an astral cartographer. Very challenging work, I’m assured.”

“Did you have any classes with her?”

“No, none.”

“Then if I may ask, how did you meet her?”

“Are you asking if we’re at all involved with each other?”

“Julian, please, it’s nothing nearly so crass. I’m just curious how you two know each other.”

“Ah! Then if that’s all, we met in the OAS waiting room. I was there waiting to see Theresa, to get my off-campus housing agreement approved for another year, when Melora happened to be there, also waiting for her own accommodations hearing. She kept looking over at me, so I looked up and smiled and said hello like I know you’re supposed to. She said hello back, and then she asked, who are you here for, and I told her, myself. She looked at me in a very strange way, and then asked me why I was there, and I said, I need to get my housing agreement renewed. She said, I don’t want to know what you’re doing here, I want to know why you’re here. And I knew because she’s not Human – she’s an Elaysian, to be precise, actually the first one in Starfleet – I knew genetic conditions wouldn’t carry nearly the stigma with her as it would with another Human, so I knew I could tell her I’m autistic and explain what autism is and what it means and why I need off-campus housing without having to worry too much. So I was able to explain it to her, and she told me about her low-gravity needs, and when we have time between classes sometimes we meet for coffee in the student’s café.”

“Well. If – if there’s time while I’m here, I might enjoy meeting her for coffee along with you. If you’re all right with that.”

“I think so, yes. I’ll let her know.”

Innogen did her best to pretend like she’d never seen the exhibit before, and whether Julian noticed or cared seemed immaterial next to him speaking about the individual pieces. Some of what he said sounded like full quotations from a tour he himself had been on, but it was when he sounded more like himself, giving his honest opinions about the use of colour, or light and shadow, or triple-field depth perception, was when Innogen gave up any interest in the art, no matter how much she liked it, and paid attention to Julian instead.

Onatah and Rupe didn’t host him for dinner quite so much anymore since their daughter had finally arrived, but with Innogen in the city, they swaddled Elspeth up and coddled her with afternoon naps to keep her awake through the evening. At the table, everyone assured Onatah she wouldn’t have to leave the room or pull out a blanket if Elspeth got hungry when everyone else was eating. They were her husband, a grown woman, and someone studying the intricacies of the living body; a little breastfeeding was nothing.

“I’ve noticed Humans are fairly relaxed about this sort of thing,” Onatah said while she cradled Elspeth as she ate her dinner, leaving Onatah just one hand free to eat her own. “Back on Anaba, it’s generally the decorous course of action to recuse yourself while your baby eats.”

“This, I keep telling my dear, darling wife – certainly, there are some places one still does that on Earth. Attending an opera, perhaps. But outside of those rare situations, we understand there’s nothing wrong with simply feeding a baby when that baby is hungry, no matter where they’re being fed.”

“I keep waiting to run into you in the clinic,” Julian smiled. “I’m sure it’s going to happen eventually.”

“Remember, if we tell you when we’ll be there, that’s just cheating,” Rupe said.

“Certainly.”

“What is it you do in the clinic? I can’t imagine you’re beginning residency already,” Onatah asked.

“No, that’s not –” 

“Julian’s residency won’t start until his fourth year,” Innogen said. “He isn’t –”

“Aunt Innogen, _please_ ,” Julian hissed, then pouted, pulled a face, and said, “Residency doesn’t begin until the fourth year. Right now, all I’m doing in the clinic is learning how to interact with patients and other doctors in a professional setting.”

“Forgive me, but if you’re not properly doctoring yet, there can’t be much patient interaction you can do.”

“Don’t worry, they aren’t _real_ patients. They’re actors.”

“Actors?” Rupe asked.

“Yes. They’re usually in-between jobs – they call them ‘gigs’ for some reason, must be some actor’s superstition – and want some good work to keep them sharp. What we med students do is interview them in small groups like they’re really patients, and get used to having that sort of role and responsibility so we’re not too overwhelmed when we begin our proper practice.”

“I honestly had no idea that sort of thing existed,” Onatah said, her ears pricked straight up. Elspeth let go, and Onatah burped her and returned her to her sling.

“It’s – calling it _fun_ isn’t quite right, but it’s absolutely good practice. What I find most interesting is how much preparation the actors have to do to really make it seem like they’re patients.”

“Tell us about that,” Rupe said.

“Well, recently, there was one…there was an actor patient who came in because of some illness of hers. She said she’d been out traveling, off to Bolarus IX, and had eaten the food, seen the sights, and possibly picked up something. We had her vitals presented to us, and we asked some more questions, and someone suggested it was influenza caught by an immune system weakened from travel and close exposure to other individuals who had been carrying a particular strain. It seemed like it wasn’t anything more than that, and it might not have been. Now, she knew what was really wrong with her, and so did our teacher; this was to see how well we’d do with taking patient histories and really listening to them. Most of what she’d described seemed consistent with the diagnosis. It could have been the truth about what had happened. We weren’t sure if that was, in fact, the entire truth. Our teacher’s put us in situations where we had to get more of the truth out of our patients than what they first gave us.”

Julian took a drink of water. “I’d been noticing how she’d held herself in the interview – whether they’re real patients or very good actors, people hold themselves in different ways when they’re in pain. It’s not something a lot of people can manage to be stoic enough about for it to not bleed into their body language, and it was in hers. She was holding herself like she was in a lot of pain. I knew it wasn’t just because of her illness, because she wasn’t _holding_ herself like she was in pain for influenza, she was holding herself like the pain was deeper and bigger. So it had to be something else. I asked her if she had any friends she could call on while she was at home getting better, if there was anyone she could get to help her out for a while. I put on my good doctor voice, you know, _it’s quite all right, I’m here to help, just answer as best you can._ ”

“That’s remarkable,” Onatah murmured. “Did you have classes for that?”

“No, I just listened and repeated what the professionals sounded like when they talked. Anyway, as for the patient, I asked her even when my classmates were done, and I did my best to be gentle with her, and it – well, it came out she’d been sick for a good long time. It came out that…” Julian took a deep breath. “It came out that she’d – it was an ectopic pregnancy that for her symptoms would have killed her within a week.”

“What.” Innogen said.

“That was what had happened in the story the actress gave to us. It wasn’t what _actually_ happened, not her sick, her pregnant and not even aware of it. I was the only one who thought there might be something else, and our teacher commended me for that, although he didn’t much understand me when I said I’d realized something was wrong from how she was holding herself. I suppose he might take things like that for granted, even at his age.”

“I have no trouble believing that,” Onatah said. “I’m always complimented that I read Humans easily, but in truth, I don’t. I pay attention because I can’t take it for granted the way you can. Well, most of you – not you, Julian.”

“Thank you.”

A short while later, in the guest bedroom with the door shut behind them, as they talked in private about how he was doing before Innogen collapsed for the night, he brought up the story again.

“You did well with your actress.”

“Thank you.” He’d learned to say _thank you_ about half the time instead of _I know_ or something in that vein. That itself was grand improvement over never saying it at all. “They call them actors here, no matter if they’re an actress or not.”

“Right.”

“There’s just something about it I keep thinking about.”

“What’s that, then?”

“I just can’t help but think…every case we’ve had to take, it’s never been everything we’re told up-front at the start. It’s always something more. Sometimes there’s a minor detail in the patient history we didn’t think to ask about that’s ultimately irrelevant but would have been good to know. Sometimes it’s something bigger, like with that actress. Sometimes they flat-out lie to us, I don’t know why, but they do. And it just makes me think, if we’re never getting the truth, what if that’s really the purpose of all these exercises. Not just to get us used to talking with patients. To get us used to being lied to.”

“If it helps, from having been a patient and what I know of doctors, that’s probably why.”

“Why, Aunt Innogen, that’s remarkably cynical of you.”

“Thank you,” she said, and he finally smiled.

“People do sometimes ask me why I picked medicine to study, and I never say it’s because I worked with doctors so much as a child I know them all so well by now I’m unqualified to do anything else.”

“Trust me, there are worse reasons to choose a career.”

“Why did you choose design?”

“Why?” He’d never asked her that before. It’d been so long since anyone had wanted to know, she’d forgotten the words she’d once memorized to answer offhand. “Part of it was because I wanted to. I knew I liked the work involved, I knew I’d keep on liking it for a long time, so I went on to pursue it for my life. I didn’t really fall into it the way some people talk about it – Portia Sanders, you remember her?”

“I remember,” he murmured.

“She said she got into design almost by accident, she’d wanted to be an architect. But I knew I liked graphic design and illustration work, so I focused on that. And I suppose I picked it because I knew it’d be a good fit for me as a person. I’m happy when I can do that, when I know someone understands me, and people seem to be happy with what I make, so I keep with it.” He nodded, clearly anticipating more, and Innogen suddenly knew how he looked at his mock patients, waiting to be told the whole truth and nothing less than that. “There’s a lot I find deeply satisfying about it. Even if I hadn’t been able to devote my life to it as a career, I’d still have had it in my life as a hobby. Puzzling out what makes one set of images and ideas work over another, or arranging it all so it flows together and every, every corner of each letter fits, is – it’s not just the shapes and the forms, it’s – it’s empathy through work, it’s _communication_. And it’s always satisfying when that communication is there, when I know I can make that happen. It’s always been very deeply so for me.”

“Very deeply so,” he echoed, smiling honestly now.

“Yes.”

“I’ll keep that all in mind when I next look at some graphic design.”

“If you’re curious, I could recommend a book or two on it. If you have time, of course.”

“I might soon. Not this upcoming semester – I’m taking some engineering extension courses while I still have a little flexibility in my schedule.”

“Just let me know when you think you’ll be free to read them.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”


	30. Grade 9

Time zones, client meetings, and needing to sleep meant Innogen hadn’t been able to watch the match live, but waiting for her when she got up the next morning, settling onto her stool with an extra-large mug of tea, was a message from Julian providing a link to the relevant video.

Racquetball had been the closest thing to tennis that any of the Starfleet sports clubs had been able to offer, and enough of the skills had transferred that Julian hadn’t needed much time to become reasonably good at it. Becoming good enough to be elected team captain had taken him a good deal longer. She’d given him what advice she could provide about managing people and defusing conflicts, balancing strengths and weaknesses between a team’s members to best take advantage of what each of them had to offer, and it’d worked out well enough for him so far that he’d been elected for a second year, not an impossibility or an unprecedented feat, but one remarkable enough the announcer made note of it when listing his accomplishments as he was shown stretching in one corner of the court, before the camera moved to focus on his opponent.

The game itself was easy to follow, in terms of the mechanics of the actions. A ball was hit around, points were scored, the players moved up and down and across the court to best hit the ball and score points and prevent their opponent from doing the same. Julian hadn’t told her if he’d won or not, though he could have, just a cheeky note saying he’d let the suspense sustain itself for as long as possible. Innogen knew that, what with the match having taken place the previous day, it was only because she was watching it before doing anything else with her day that was keeping anything about the outcome a surprise. She knew she could easily look away and find out and then try to watch the match dispassionately; she also knew that would ruin the experience, removed as she was from it.

Her leg was jumping up and down underneath the desk. She forced it down, took a long drink of tea, and kept watching.

Julian and his opponent – she couldn’t be bothered to try to remember his name – were doing fairly evenly, accruing roughly point for point. Halfway through, the Vulcan abandoned any pretense of fair play, having spent the first half of the game sussing out Julian’s specific techniques and weaknesses and began exploiting them ruthlessly, very nearly surgically. The cameras never got close to the player’s faces, but even at a distance, while playing, in those uniforms, Innogen could see from how Julian held himself and shook his head when he missed a shot how upset he was, how much he hated what was happening.

She watched the Vulcan rake up point after point, retaining posture and composure, practically dancing on air compared to the Human working himself into a frenzy right beside him. Innogen almost wanted to turn it off and check the final results so she could at least watch the rest of it without feeling too downtrodden the rest of the day, and she let her hand hover over the button to click to take her away until she saw Julian change. He stopped right in the middle of the court, an event strange enough that both the announcer and his opponent took a moment to do absolutely nothing but observe it. Then he began playing again, in a way Innogen almost couldn’t recognize as Julian. It went somewhere beyond ruthless, all the way through relentless, out the other side into _reckless_. All he seemed concerned with was hitting the ball – not his opponent, not his own safety, not scoring more points, not the limitations or rules of the game. All he was doing, was trying to hit the ball.

Julian ended up winning with a twelve-point lead and a loud whoop of joy from Innogen she couldn’t even make herself feel properly ashamed for.

After it was over, he and Tanok stood side-by-side, Julian dripping with sweat and the Vulcan as composed as he’d ever been. They were asked questions together and individually, answering in turn. Tanok took a few seconds to compose his responses while Julian let everything in his head flow out without giving any thought to it; Tanok allowed himself to close his eyes and sigh and even look at Julian in what Innogen might be generous enough to call bemusement while Julian was all smiles and open eyes that he brought up to meet Tanok’s or the interviewer’s without looking like he’d forced himself to, or without looking away.  
 _  
“So tell me – you were doing really well up to the end there, but I’ve never seen anyone come back from a point deficit like that. How’d you manage it?”_

_“Julian played with…formidable talent, and I wish him all the best.”_

_“Oh, it was easy! All I did was stop thinking about what I was trying to do, and just focused on what I needed to do. I didn’t even think about how I needed the ball, or what I’d have to do to get it – just on what I had to do at that precise moment. Because if I didn’t know what I was going to do next, how could Tanok?”_

_“As improvisations go, I am forced to admit its effectiveness. There was a very nearly animalistic quality to such a strategy.”_

_“Thank you.”_

She’d seen Julian get like that a few times, usually at parties or large social gatherings he couldn’t manage to stay himself in, running on nerves and pure feeling, although she hoped honest adrenaline was a nicer way to get there. He looked like he was still playing in the match from the way he tossed his head when making a joke, or threw his hands around when he wanted to make a point, bobbing and weaving his head, making eye contact incidentally and often to make it look like he was doing it continuously so long as he kept a smile on his face. Innogen could tell from the way he was holding himself at the end of the interview that Julian didn’t want to crawl into a dark room and force himself to be alone for a while. He was enjoying himself. Honestly smiling.

_“As is the customary Human farewell, good luck to you.”_

_“And to you, dif tor heh smusma.”_

She scrolled down to find his following comments to her dryly noting that at this point in her reading she’d either spoil herself by checking the news or learned the outcome the old-fashioned way by watching the match. If she hadn’t, then she ought to scroll back up and watch it herself because that would be all he’d have to say on the matter until she’d proved otherwise.


	31. Some Fantastic

Starfleet Medical’s uniforms were unique in that the only major modification between them and those the interns wore before graduation was the colour. All other disciplines and schools and branches – from mechanical engineering to xenolinguistics – gave their students and cadets and officers-in-training distinct outfits quite different from those they’d be wearing once they received their commissions. But when it came to Starfleet Medical, students wore almost exactly what they’d wear when they passed their final exams and took their postings.

It meant that when Julian walked into Starfleet Medical’s clinic lobby wearing an intern’s pale blue medical gown, it was the first time Innogen had seen him in anything resembling such in person. He’d sent her pictures, but to see it firsthand was a potent reminder there was less than a year before he’d be wearing a proper Starfleet uniform.

She smiled, and he turned his head to let her kiss his cheek, before returning the gesture, hands carefully placed on her shoulders.

“It’s good to see you, Aunt Innogen.”

“It’s good to see you too, Julian. And you’re – you’re really looking very sharp.”

“Sharp?” He smiled. “That’s not a word I hear much, so thank you for the rarity of it. Do you want something to drink? Tea, coffee, water, lemonade? American or English?”

“Coffee, actually. It’s been a long day, I could use a slap to the face.”

“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it; we’ve got some nasty surgeons around here. But in any case, come with me.”

“Wait,” she glanced back at the map on the wall, “the cafeteria’s not this way.”

“Yes, but the doctor’s lounge is. It’s all right, you’re with me. Just walk like you belong here.” Innogen had been inside hospitals before, but not as anything other than a patient. It wasn’t as though she could dress the part of a doctor, not with her abjectly civilian clothes; it wasn’t as though she couldn’t make herself look the part, walking fast and looking angry and _striding_ like she owned the place. Julian took her down restricted hallways to get to the staff lounge, a bright, cheerful room with a bank of replicators along one wall and what looked like rather luxurious couches and chairs as far as hospital lounges went. They ordered their drinks, and sat at one of the tables by a window with a sliver of San Francisco Bay visible between the other buildings.

“So how’s the agency? I’m sorry I couldn’t make it out for your party, but – well, in any case, you’ll now be taking it in new and exciting directions?”

“I can only dream. I had a number of half-finished projects just shoved onto my desk, all right, four half-finished projects shoved onto my desk without any warning or advance notice. And it’s not as though she couldn’t have told me, she’d given me some weeks of mentorship before I took the partnership position, maybe she thought I’d just hit the ground running with these. Which I have, I’ll have you know, we’ve managed to land the Dutailier account, and while it’s been some time since we’ve worked with furniture, they seemed impressed with my suggestions to incorporate non-Human species into some of the pieces.” Julian nodded for her to keep going, and she took a sip of coffee first. “So I’m pleased about that.”

“I wonder how long it’s going to take for you to not have to do any work to get new accounts. Just, hire the Bashir-Williams Design Agency, whatever they make will be genius and perfect.”

“Never, I hope. It’s good to keep being challenged.”

He raised his mug in agreement, and Innogen knocked hers against it to say the same. Then he asked, “How’s Olivia?”

“Oh, goodness,” Innogen shook her head. “It’s – actually, thank you for asking, I’m glad you did. It’s going quite well between us. I’ve, ah, since we’ve spoken I’ve invited her to stay the night, and –”

“And thank you, Aunt Innogen, that’s quite plenty enough,” he held up a hand, mock-grimacing, “I’m capable of filling in the relevant details at this point in my life. But – congratulations. It’s always nice to have someone sleeping over. As it were.”

“As it were,” she echoed with a giggle. “She’d very much like to meet you in person, you know.”

“Every time we’ve spoken she seems like someone I’d like to spend time with. But you know, working professionals all three of us. You could bring her with you to graduation; you know you’re allowed additional guests.”

“I do, yes. I might.”

“Finally see if she’s properly earned nephew approval.”

“And here I thought she’d earned that by sending you that cider as a birthday gift.”

He laughed and looked away. “I am happy for you, you know.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s…I know I made you –”

“Julian.”

“I know I made you wait, and that I stopped you from –”

“Julian, _please_.” She placed a hand on his. “Please.”

“My apologies.”

“It’s all right. It’s just…it’s not quite what I’d like to spend time talking about.”

“All right.”

“How about you tell me about your current rotation? Or residency. What specialty are you working in right now?”

“Oh!” Julian’s face lit up. “Burn care, actually.”

“Burn care?”

“Yes. It’s a _fascinating_ specialization, and I was thinking about pursuing it for a while. It requires a great deal of cross-disciplinary training, because of the dynamics of the injuries – the fact that burns are an _evolving_ wound makes them unique in medicine, across all known species, even in non-carbon-based life-forms. It’s not like getting a cut on your skin, or breaking a bone, that’s the injury and it’s done, it needs to heal. Burns _keep going_ , even after the acid’s cleaned off, or the fire’s put out, however they occur, it has to do with how the body breaks down during and after the initial injury’s sustained, because when – ah, hello, Joyce – because when –”

“Hey, Bashir.” The young woman waved at them before continuing onto the replicators.

“Because when the injury spreads, it’s almost like an _infection_ , so in order to contain it – Joyce, why don’t you come join us?”

“I’ve got a minute, sure. Thanks.” She pulled up a chair and sat down, wrapping her hands around her steaming drink. In a flat American accent, she asked, “So how’s it all with you? And who’s this that you haven’t introduced to me?”

“Oh, this is my aunt, Innogen. Aunt Innogen, this is Joyce Morales. We took our surgical rotations together.”

“Yeah, I can see it – anyway, it’s nice to meet you.” She held out a hand Innogen shook gently. “What’s got you coming to San Francisco?”

“Just a lucky bit of free time to see Julian.”

“Right, he told me you’d made – something at your –”

“Partner in her agency,” Julian said.

Joyce snapped her fingers. “That was it. Congratulations.”

“Thank you. So,” she pressed before either had a chance to speak again, “You two did surgical rotations together?”

“Yeah,” Joyce said.

“Did you meet each other there?”

“We had pediatric medicine together as well, but we didn’t get a chance to know each other then,” Julian said.

“We were assigned body stations right next to each other. In the old days we’d have had to wait for people to die and donate their bodies to science for everything, but now we can do most of the practicing in a holosuite. But we still practice on at least one cadaver each – Doctor McCoy gave us that lecture, you need –”

“You’ve gotta give _weight_ to the bodies in your hands, you can’t get that from solid light and hard-packed photons,” Julian said, jerking his chin up as he drew out his vowels and pulled in his consonants. “Each time you take to someone it’s their life they’re giving you, and you need to see that responsibility for what it is. It’s not the real thing unless there are no do-overs, and the sooner you learn how that feels, the better.”

Joyce laughed. “Yeah, that was him all over. Oh, shoot, I’ve gotta beat feet – Dorian’s gonna take my head if I’m late for his rounds again.” She gulped the rest of her drink as only a student could, as Innogen hadn’t managed in decades, before jumping to her feet. “Hey, I’m still gonna see you at the barbeque on Friday, right?”

“I’ll be there with bells on,” Julian smiled.

“I don’t know what that means, but I’ll take it.”

“Yes, we’ll be there,” Innogen said.

“Great.” Joyce threw them a thumbs-up and beat her feet out of the room, leaving Julian and Innogen alone again. He glanced at her with a squint and a smirk that didn’t quite seem to match each other.

“Weren’t you going home Thursday?”

Innogen smiled. “There’s going to be some complaining, but if I want to extend my vacation a day and a half, there’s hardly anyone to stop me.”

“Ah, the vaunted benefits of leadership.”

“Quite so.” She finished her drink and was about to go recycle it when Julian grabbed her mug just as he stood. “Oh, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Aunt Innogen. It’s going to be a lunch, so we’ll have to get up a little early to make it over here in time.”

“Far better for us to be early than late. I’d like to make a good first impression for your friends.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to – as to _worry_ , Aunt Innogen, I’ve never had anything but good things to say about you.”

Whatever else he’d been planning to say, he was right about her not needing to worry. The meat on the grill came out of replicators, raw to be cooked outdoors, quite unlike the Lebanese barbeques she’d been to recently. But other than that, things were much the same: people ate with their hands while standing around, mingling and talking, enjoying the company out in the open air. Much of the talk was medical, and even if it focused far more on post-surgery convalescence than Innogen felt comfortable with as mealtime conversation, no one else minded the subject matter. Julian even cheerfully discussed post-burn tissue regeneration between bites of his food. He was wearing one of his riotous sundresses, but it was barely the most colourful garment anyone had on. As someone quite a bit older than nearly everyone else present, Innogen hung back instead of diving in face-first, accepting conversation as it came but largely watching how people got on with each other. She’d seen how much more herself Rebekah was becoming, and she could see how much of himself Julian had already learned to be. He spoke easily, gestured well, demonstrated his attention by turning his body to the person speaking even without necessarily meeting their eyes with his own – she couldn’t hear him, but she could see the people around him, and all of them told her he was doing so much better than just quite all right.

“Thank you,” she told him afterwards, back in his apartment. She’d be catching a late-night ferry, and he still had some reading left, so between the two of them, a little time spent sitting and doing nothing sounded quite nice. He wasn’t looking towards her except the occasional glance, but after what she’d seen of him, she knew she could forgive him this. “I’m glad I got the chance to meet so many of your friends.”

“I told you not to worry.”

“So you did,” she laughed. “Do you – do you go to those sorts of things often?”

“Not often, not _that_ often, but if it fits my schedule. Or if I make them fit into it. Reasonably often.”

“And do you meet these people outside of these Starfleet Medical get-togethers and clinic rotations?”

“Sometimes, yes. If both our schedules allow for it.”

“Does that ever include sleepovers?”

“Aunt Innogen…”

“Sorry,” she held up both her hands. “My apologies.”

“Thank you.”

On the ferry back to London, over the Eastern coast of North America with Maine just visible on the portside windows, she smiled, thinking how perhaps it hadn’t quite been necessary to ask. She’d gotten a look inside his bedroom, and his bear had finally been sitting on the windowsill beside his bed. Not on it, beside it, and that had been answer enough.


	32. Falling For The First Time

Julian had told Innogen where he’d be leaving for after graduation almost as soon as he’d received the news himself. It hadn’t been a surprise, seeing as how he’d requested the assignment. Such were the benefits of graduating valedictorian. He’d called her up, time zones be damned, as soon as he’d gotten home after his meeting with the relevant staff officers, waking her up to let her know he’d chosen to send himself to serve in what had been a war zone all of six weeks ago.

“I won’t be _on_ Bajor as such. The assignment is actually on the old Cardassian station, they’re leaving it behind as part of the terms of their withdrawal. It’s called Deep Space Nine, which is a translation of its Cardassian name –”

“That’s – that’s not actually that much better. I don’t know if you should be quite so happy about this.”

“Why shouldn’t I? They’re glad I’m coming along! Two of the people I spoke with today were _admirals_ , Aunt Innogen, they asked to talk to me! They said it was wonderful someone so qualified was taking such an interest in this position. They were afraid no one would want it, that it’d have to be assigned to someone instead, they told me they were happy someone volunteered for it.”

“I’m glad you had the chance to speak with them. But are you sure of what they were trying to tell you?”

“I’m quite certain of what they told me. I’m going to be the Chief Medical Officer of Deep Space Nine when I graduate, that’s what I know they told me.”

“Yes, Julian, I know that. What I mean was, they said they were happy someone volunteered for it. You don’t think they weren’t also saying something else?”

“Oh, they asked if I was _certain_ I wanted it, they mentioned all the ships I could lead expeditions on, the surgical residencies I could have in places like Paris or Denobula, but I didn’t want to have any of those things. I made sure they listened to me when I said I wanted to go to Deep Space Nine.” He crossed his arms. “I know what they were saying. I know they were trying to be too polite to ask why out loud. I was raised in England, Aunt Innogen, please, American social manners are nothing, you realize that? Not even for me. Going to Deep Space Nine is something I want to do. Please let me enjoy it for what it is to me. It’s a chance for me to get out into the galaxy and show it what I’m made of. It’s something I earned. It’s something I _want_.”

“No, no, no, I’m not saying you shouldn’t want it, I’m not saying that. I’m saying you should – I’m saying you should be concerned for this. It’s not Federation space, it’s going to be dangerous, a war just ended there, there’s so much –”

“Why do you think I don’t know that?” Innogen drew back at the harshness in his voice. “Why do you think I don’t know what I want?”

“Because – give me a moment, please. Because I’m worried for what might happen to you while you’re there.”

“This is just because you’re worried about me.”

“We both know you’d be objectively safer in – God, I don’t know, in Paris.”

“I don’t want to go to Paris. I’m not going to Paris. I’m going to Deep Space Nine. I worked hard to make sure I’d graduate valedictorian so no one would be able to take this from me. Aunt Innogen, _no one else_ even thought about going to that – my classmates call it, and I’m sorry but this is what they say, they call it an absolute craphole of a station. None of them want to go there, or have anything to do with it. _Someone_ should have something to do with it. I know I’m that someone.”

It was very noble of him, and it might even have been true. Innogen didn’t want to say she didn’t know if she could believe that. She couldn’t say how much she wanted to believe it was the entire truth of the matter. As much as she knew how Julian thrived in medicine, how much he breathed the oaths and values, she couldn’t.

“Why don’t you think I can do this?”

So she didn’t. She hung her head and dropped her shoulders to let herself show Julian how tired she felt. When she looked up, she thought of goslings, and smiled wide and honest even as she didn’t mean it. “It’s that I’m _worried_ for you. It’s a former war zone. I don’t doubt you’ll do everything you need to do as a doctor and do it all very well. I’m just worried for you, if you’re doing it _there_.”

“Oh! Well, there’s no need to worry about _that_ , everyone in Starfleet gets weapons training, remember how I told you about practicing my marksmanship? I doubt there’s going to be major fights on the station, but if there are, even if that’s the case there will be plenty of people around on our side, my side. Starfleet’s side. You don’t need to worry. We’ll all be protecting each other.”

Innogen had to put work into it when she said she was relieved to hear that. She didn’t have to put work into it when she said she was proud of him, and that she’d happily come over to San Francisco for a month if that was how long it would take for him to pack up his apartment, that she was happy he told her right away and would have more to say in the morning, provided he let her know when she might call. 

“After tonight, it’d be fair for you to wake _me_ up,” he grinned.

“Don’t tempt me.”

She laughed as he bid her good-morning, logging off his end of the conversation, her eyes echoing blue shift against the suddenly dark screen. Laughing seemed healthy, given what the future was going to hold for the two of them. Largely for Julian, much more for him than her, but she had some measure in it too. She was almost tempted to go outside and stare up at the sky, the starless London nighttime sky that was still so very bright, and try to find where Bajor was, to see where Julian was going.

Innogen went back to bed, and let Olivia wrap her arms around her. 

It wasn’t how either she or Julian had wanted things to go, not with so little time left between them; it wasn’t something she could ask him about, and she knew she’d never quite be certain, when she came to see him with just four days before graduation, seven for his birthday, and thirteen until he left Earth. Innogen had never quite given up on her petitions for him to come back to England, even once, even for an hour. For all he’d spoken of missing it, he’d never returned. She could always see how much he’d missed her in the way he waved to her the moment he caught sight of her, in the way he leaned into her embrace and squeezed her shoulders and turned his head to let her give him a kiss. In how he nudged her cheek so she could turn her head to let him give her one in return.

There were so many things she couldn’t ask him. So many things she couldn’t tell him.

What she could do, what she had wanted to do for a good long while, was stand aside to see Julian and Olivia greet each other in person for the first time. Olivia was even taller than Julian, a legacy of her long-gone boyhood, and carried herself with a dignity and grace that only came from the hard work of joyful transformation. It was one of the things that had first attracted Innogen to her. She was hardly a stranger to Julian, and he knew her well enough he would have been able to make her tea to her exact specifications, but it was still their first time _meeting_. Olivia didn’t move in to hug Julian, simply stood in the ferryport terminal and gave him the option to come to her, if he so wanted.

Even though he didn’t, Innogen still smiled when Julian offered her his arm, the better to lead a lady to the taxicab – a gesture he must have picked up from a movie, but one that made Olivia laugh. 

Rupe was happy to meet another Midlander, their accents quickly slipping back to the old Derbyshire vowels, and Onatah was delighted to speak with a Human she could almost see eye-to-eye with.

Even though Julian offered, and Olivia admitted it would be nice to spend time with him, she turned down his invitation of an afternoon with Innogen. “It’s very kind of you, but this is time you should be spending with your aunt.”

“Will we still be on for dinner?”

“That, I’d like very much.”

“Splendid,” Julian practically thrummed.

He’d gotten together a lot of the packing materials ahead of time, and recycled some of his non-essential clothes, but that was the extent of it.

“I’ve been in contact with the property’s broker for a couple of months now,” he said, “and she found someone who’ll be moving in the day after I leave. Her name’s Grace, she’s quite nice. When she came to take a look at the place, she agreed she’d keep some of the furniture.”

“It won’t be long before some of it’s just going to come standard with the property.”

“One good conversation with the superintendent and it’ll be set for all posterity. Now that I think of it, I don’t know where…what was his name – where Daniel got some of the furniture to begin with. I still have his contact information, I ought to ask. Pass on the oral traditions of the residence.” He stopped rummaging through his closet to turn to Innogen. “That reminds me, did you have any plans for tomorrow?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“Because I’m about to make some. What dresses did you pack?”

“Tell me why you’re asking, then I’ll answer.”

“Well, I’m sure you brought along something suitably formal for the graduation ceremonies, but what I have in mind for tomorrow is going to be a good deal more casual.”

An open-air festival at Starfleet Academy to celebrate the end of summer with food and crafts and music and dance would be, as Julian promised, far more casual than his graduation. Innogen had packed her good dress for that, in its own garment bag, and had managed the foresight to bring along something much less formal, something that could breathe and swish just right around her legs during a late summer night, a rich, shimmering silver-brown that flowed over her body just right that she wore when she wanted to feel like she was young. As she slid it on in the guest bathroom with Olivia waiting outside and watched herself turn this way and that in the mirror, she smoothed it out over her stomach and knew, immediately and perfectly, that this would be the last time she’d let herself wear it.

The festival wasn’t quite the riot she’d pictured, not a party or a fair but a large outdoor social gathering, resplendent with the fierce possession of change and possibility that she herself no longer had. Current students, near-graduates, Academy professors and Starfleet officers and civilian San Francisco residents, friends and family all dancing around each other, swaying in the air with the sounds and the smells. Julian’s riotous starburst shirt was far from the most colourful thing there, not with booths displaying stained-glass wind chimes against white sheets, not with the row of a dozen food carts handing out two-bite portions of hand-cooked dishes made to order, not with half the quadrant’s species represented in this little open space. _Definitely_ not with a booth dedicated to the craft of tie-dye with many people making shirts just like Julian’s own. Music played over a local PA system, occasionally broken up by announcements; she craned her neck and saw a DJ at an open-air stage near the back of the festival’s area. The DJ gave another announcement about the recycling stations, and then put the microphone down so she could play another song and lose herself to the music and the performance for the crowds.

Julian motioned for Innogen and Olivia to follow him down the row of food carts before he even looked at anything else. Innogen couldn’t see through him, but then he turned and handed them cups of American lemonade, and she laughed for a reason she couldn’t precisely name.

“And what are we going to be doing while we’re here?” Olivia asked as she sipped, holding her cup with two hands – perhaps a bit much, but Innogen always loved how Olivia _performed_ herself in public. It was something Innogen had recognized. She didn’t know it quite as Olivia did, didn’t approach it from the same place, but they’d agreed there was enough common ground between the two of them for them to stand together.

“Just enjoying it,” Julian said. “I’ve been to a few of these before, I’m sure you can guess what with the shirt and all, so I know what they’ve got here. There’s the food area, where we are, and over to the north section,” he pointed without any hesitation or thought, “there’s the crafting area, we walked through that on our way over. There’s a performance stage that way, with fire dancing when it gets to nighttime. We don’t have to stay to see it if you’d rather leave early. We can leave whenever you like. What would you like to see first?”

“Whatever’s over there.” Innogen pointed south.

“As you like it,” he said, and they started walking. “There’s going to be more of the culture booths this way. Well, not ‘culture’ as such – more physical activities, things people can do to you in public, health crafts like soap and aromatherapy samples. From all over the Federation. There’s club booths, too, and a couple of years ago I saw a bit of a Klingon martial arts tournament, just a bit of sparring to get people interested to come.”

“I wasn’t aware this was going to be a culture exposition,” Olivia said. 

“Not always. It’s grown into that role a fair bit in the last few years, at least that’s what I’ve seen myself. It might go back to a simpler craft festival in the future.”

“I assume there’s an information booth around here somewhere,” Innogen said.

“By the front of the quad.” Julian pointed again. “Why?”

“All I was thinking was that it might be nice to see if they’ve got anything on the history of all of this, now that I’m thinking of it and we’re here.” She took another sip of lemonade. “But it can wait, if you’d rather we just enjoy ourselves. I take it you would?”

“I’d, ah, been hoping for that, rather.”

“Then we should get to enjoying,” Olivia said.

“Splendid. Last year there was this one dancer who – wait…” He looked around, cocked his head, and burst into a grin, “Oh my God, it’s Ophelia!”

It took Innogen a moment to comprehend, to register what she was hearing and for the music to hit her ears and get to her brain, a moment more than what Julian had needed to hear Ophelia playing on the PA system. He stood rooted in surprise to the spot with the crowd moving around the three of them, face alight in surprise and pure delight as Ophelia, six months younger than Innogen and another casualty of the Shakespearian naming that had been all the rage for the better part of a decade, sang to them, sang to everyone, sang just for Julian. He trembled for how happy he was, his eyes shining, as Ophelia sang to Julian, and just as she had sung to him when he was a child, she sang to him again, as she would always sing to him.

_“Someday I will wash away this city, someday I will wash away these stones…someday I will wash away this city, someday I will wash it from my bones.”_

Innogen didn’t think it was the best song Ophelia had ever written. She knew that didn’t matter. Other people were moving around them, going about their business, and Julian listened, listened intently, nothing else in the world but the music. She brought a hand to her mouth, a gesture she’d seen done a hundred thousand times before she’d understood it and began doing it herself, and she knew not even Olivia saw what was happening. No one else had reason to hold themselves back from crying.

She’d watched him listen to music when he was six years old, utterly and completely enraptured. Innogen hadn’t been able to listen to music like she was six since she was six, and here Julian was, almost twenty years later, and he still felt it just as deeply – all that he’d seen in his life, and he could still have such joy.

“I had such a crush on Ophelia when I was sixteen,” Julian said, after the music had ended and another song began and they continued walking through the festival.

“Oh, me too,” Innogen told him.

“ _Everyone_ had a crush on Ophelia when they were sixteen,” Olivia grinned. “My _houseplants_ had a crush on her. But it’s nice to see that good taste runs in the family.”

They stayed at the festival on through the day, into evening, and left well after night had arrived, the fire dancers being all Julian had promised they’d be. A little shuttlebus took them and several other festival-goers ready to return to real life from the Academy to Starfleet’s headquarters, driving them across the Golden Gate Bridge into the heart of the Presidio. From there it was a short walk to the bus stop, and they caught their own lines, going their separate ways to where they’d sleep.

Julian didn’t even seem tired when he showed up at the house at half-past seven, happy to give Elspeth his undivided attention before he collected Innogen for the day. “Though I might just keep you instead,” he said to the girl in his arms. “Take you with me and pretend you’re my aunt, tell everyone it’s you on the invitations.”

Elspeth snorted in response, butting his chin with her forehead. “You’re too silly.”

“That he might well be, but it’s not something you should hold against him,” Rupe said as she entered his embrace. “After all, he’s only Human.” Elspeth giggled and nuzzled her father. Innogen knew that if there was a time to feel something more than humor at the wordplay and pleasure of shared company and pride at seeing Julian’s skill with children, it would have to be this time. Instead, she bid good-bye to her girlfriend, her friends and their daughter, taking the opportunity to walk back to Julian’s apartment rather than take a bus or taxi to better enjoy both his company and the stubborn fog, and have a little more time to discuss the fine points of the last few days of his current living arrangements. Criticism of them came when they arrived and without even having to say a word, Innogen doing nothing more than running a finger over one of the end tables and coming away with a thick coating of dust.

He looked up from folding his clothes, took in her expression and huffed out a sigh. “Yes, I’ll dust before I leave.”

“I see. You were waiting until it was time for you to move out to dust. Otherwise you’d simply be wasting your efforts. Very efficient of you, Julian, I’m quite proud.”

Julian shook his head and turned back to folding. “That’s something else I’m looking forward to about living on a space station. I’ll never have to dust while I’m there.”

“What do you mean, ‘never have to’?”

“It’s a space station, Aunt Innogen, even if it’s Cardassian the same principles – all right. Now, most dust is dead skin cells that people, or in this case almost entirely me, shed. They just fall off the body when they die, and then then clump together with other dead skin cells floating through the air as well as ambient particles, settling down to make dust, like you have there. Because we’re living in a natural atmosphere right now, there’s no major external filtration systems in the air we’re currently breathing, but on a starbase or a starship, it’s a closed environment. Everything’s artificially filtered and scrubbed and re-circulated. What _really_ makes it a nice and efficient system is that the filtration process works to provide raw material fodder for the replicator system.”

“Really.” Innogen bit down on her tongue before she said, “I’d already known where dust comes from, but not that it’s such a major concern in star-going life.”

“Anywhere that’s a closed environment.”

“Did you learn all that in those engineering extension courses you loved so much?”

“Most of it. Some I just researched in preparation for moving there.” He lifted up one of his shirts, considered it, and pursed his lips and nodded, folding it with a bit more care than some of his trousers. “You told me how you’d done reading for London before you lived there. It’s the same sort of thing.”

“Maybe not the same thing precisely – no, it’s all right. I understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“I was, though.”

“You were what?”

“Waiting until I moved out to dust.” Julian looked at her again, all innocence in his wide eyes that met her own, not even a twitch to his mouth. “When I wanted to gussy up the place for sleepovers I’d put out candles.” The whole effect of the deadpan delivery was more than enough to make Innogen flop onto the bed to laugh good and properly, land on her back and let all her laughter out. Julian joined her, leaning back to brace himself on his hands as she stared up at the ceiling, taking in the plaster’s topography as she quieted down, moving her hands from her stomach to lie above her head. 

She felt the bed dip slightly, then stopped laughing entirely – went silent when she felt Julian’s hand on her own. Innogen froze, then looked over at him. He was staring at nothing in particular through the bedroom’s doorway, face neutral, and squeezed her hand one more time before he moved it away, staying where he was. She looked at him, at his face in the late afternoon light, how he almost looked like he was already gone.

“Hang on,” she rolled up onto her feet, “I’ve got something for you, just hang on.” He was on his feet when she got back a moment later from retrieving something out of the bottom of her satchel.

“What is it?”

“Something to unwrap,” she said, and handed it to him. He followed her instructions, but not before turning it over and over to try to parse out the object by the faint clues of shape and weight and what texture he could feel through the tissue paper, finally finding the seam of the tape as the wrapping’s weakest point to attack, ripping it more gently than she herself might have.

“Oh.”

“I don’t know starbase regulations on mezuzahs. I haven’t been able to find much, all I can access as a civilian says you can decorate the inside of starships quarters reasonably freely but it doesn’t say anything about doorways and I haven’t tried to ask. I thought something – something that’s both decorative _and_ symbolic would be a good thing for you to have.”

“So I can tell people without telling them.”

“Then you like it?”

“I do. Thank you.”

“It’s handmade.” Innogen pointed at the hamsa. “The wood’s non-replicated, fully and naturally grown. I don’t know where the paint’s from, but I can contact the workshop if –” 

“No, no, that’s quite all right.” He narrowed his eyes at the Hebrew, flicking over it left to right, then right to left. “Ti…Tek…talking…no, wait…”

“Tikkun. _Tikkun olam_.” Julian nodded, recognition lighting up his face. “It means to fix the world.”

“To force healing upon the world. World repair.”

“Tell me something better to give to a doctor.”

“You know, I really can’t think of anything.” After some discussion, Julian finally packed it away in the box with his clothes. “It won’t get bashed about in the move that way.”

“A good place to keep it.”

“And that means I’m going to unpack it reasonably soon as well.”

“And that too.”

“It’s not much, though, is it?” They looked at the six boxes stacked neatly by the front door. “That, and my suitcase, and…that’s it. All of that, the mezuzah, that’s it.”

“Unless you can think of something else, that’s it.”

“I thought I packed more when I came from London.”

“I honestly can’t remember. Is she taking the bed sheets?”

“Yes. That might be it. I don’t have to bring any bed sheets.”

“That could be it, then.”

“I appreciate you helping with it,” he blurted out. “I know there’s family obligation and all that but I’m happy you helped, so thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Innogen looked at Julian again, standing tall and proud and nervous, ready to send himself to God knew where, into duty and danger and distress and possibly even dignity and delight, the young man she’d raised. That she had raised. She blinked her eyes clear. 

“Aunt Innogen, I – ”

“I wouldn’t have said yes.” He looked to her. “When I – when you and I, when you came into my life. When I took custody of you. I wasn’t asked, no one asked. I wasn’t given a choice, yes or no, do I want to take care of him. If I’d been asked, I’d have said no. But now I’m glad I wasn’t asked. Because I know what I would have said. And I’m happy I have you in my life. I’m happy I could share my life with you, and that I got to share your life with mine. I don’t know how to say how glad I am that no one asked. If I’d known all of this, I’d have said yes. But I couldn’t have. If I’d been given a choice back then, I wouldn’t have said yes. I know I’d have said no. And now I’m glad no one ever asked me.”

Julian nodded once, slowly.

Then he lunged and wrapped his arms around her.

Innogen was too surprised to say anything while Julian held her tight – Julian was holding her, _Julian was holding her_ – and after a moment, he pulled back, stepped back, finally let his hands drop from her shoulders with the most delicate, fragile expression on his face.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice shaking strong. “Would you like me to make you some tea?”

“Yes, please.” Innogen wrapped her arms over her chest and looked away, to give him a chance to not have to decide when he was done. “Yes, I’d quite like it if you made us both some tea.”

Sitting at the table with cups of perfectly replicated tea, with no dynamic in its flavours or subtle nuances from the _terroir_ of the leaves and brewing time, just cups of mint green tea identical to every other cup of mint green tea ever to come out of a replicator with the only variation that Julian took his eight degrees cooler than she did. He propped his cheek in hand, elbow on the table, and with all the weight of the world behind his words, he said, “I swear to you, Aunt Innogen, I swear I’m not going to wear that hat.”

“You’re under no obligation to.”

When she saw him just before the proceedings began, true to his word, he hadn’t even picked it up when he’d collected his own ceremonial gown, passing the time by playing with the tassel of one of the honorific cords laid over his shoulders. He leaned in, leaned back, then leaned in again when she opened her arms up wide enough to tell him she was after an embrace after all. “Oh, it’s good to see you.”

“Likewise.” He moved away from her arms, keeping his eyes vaguely in the area of her face.

“Are you excited?”

“Somewhat.”

“Only somewhat? This is your big moment. You’ve earned it. Take some pride in it. Take some fear. Fear’s good to have for this sort of thing, keeps you on your toes.”

“I have more than enough fear. I think I’ve got so much it’s coming out the other side to calm. It’s like when you’ve got an accident to deal with and the bodies are coming in and you don’t have time to panic, you just –”

“Not quite the metaphor I’d use,” she said, “but I can see how that might work here too.”

“Oh, before I go, do you have any advice on the speech? I’ve practiced in front of the mirror plenty of times, but you do this professionally.”

“Well, I’ve never given a presentation on this sort of scale. Certainly not to a group this large. But you can remember no one likes to give speeches. I tell myself that whenever I have to get up in front of more than three or four people, that none of them want to be where I am, so they know I must be nervous. I’ve no idea if it’s true or not, I’m sure there are a few people out there that thrive on that sort of raw attention. But it helps me to tell myself that. And for a stage like you’ll be on, a stage that big, there’s going to be lights keeping you from seeing the audience.”

“A single blind test.”

“Something like that,” she laughed. “And look at the back of the room. Slow down your words, more than you think you’ll need to, and keep your voice low. Use the restroom before you get on stage, no matter if you think you have to or not. And just remember Olivia and I will be there, so there’s at least two people in the audience who knows you. It’ll be over soon. Dinnertime tonight. You can make it until it’s over.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about giving the speech, really. I was more concerned with what tips you might have on elocution, or things I wouldn’t think to ask about, like, yes, like having to use the facilities. Which I was absolutely going to do just as soon as you’re out of here, but I appreciate the reminder.”

“God’s sake, Julian, go now, _now!_ The line’s going to be bloody ridiculous, I’ll see you after it’s over.”

“Right, I’ll get –”

She leaned up and kissed his cheek. “Good luck.”

“Oh, ah, Aunt Innogen – ah, good luck to you too,” he said, blushing and happy.

Innogen was still smiling over it as she took her seat, Olivia waiting with a smile and a kiss of her own. It was a grand auditorium, four tiers high, windows running floor to ceiling letting in as much natural light as could be managed, decorations subtle and unmistakably Starfleet – quiet reminders of the beauty of the natural world and the majesty of the group, and gentle prompting to not forget the specific reason that had collected them all together. Seating was assigned, and they were on one of the side balconies that would put the sunlight onto the stage rather than right in her face. All of it taken together, it reminded her quite a bit of Lebanon.

The family next to hers came a few minutes later. All of them apologized perfunctorily, not profusely, in suitably flat American accents, the presumed mother sitting next to Innogen. After a few minutes, she took to chatting with them, Gwendolyn introducing the rest of her family, her eldest daughter graduating salutatorian, correctly guessing Innogen had a relative who’d be coming on stage with Innogen simply confirming the guess to be correct.

They did their best to make small talk, Olivia having a far easier time of it than Innogen – then the orchestra started, and the ceremony was off. It all went smoothly, the announcements and guest speakers doing their parts, the dean and president and salutatorian all giving their words, and finally, at last, Julian came up to speak, still bare-headed, but this was just before Starfleet, not God. He arranged a few cards in front of him, gripped both hands to the lectern, looked out over the audience, and from her seat Innogen could see he was looking for someone – until he squared his shoulders back and began to read.

_“I’ve always been taught to listen to the whisper, not the shout…”_

It was a good speech, almost the one he’d had her read over twice to make sure no major errors had come through. The only part of it which surprised her wasn’t the part about self-worth; rather, when he spoke about her, right at the very end, his last notes of thanks. About how she’d been present throughout his childhood, how he wouldn’t be standing there if she hadn’t been there for him. She knew it hadn’t been in the versions she’d read because he’d wanted her to hear it here, and she knew it wasn’t being Mandraked for how well he spoke.

“Hey. _Innogen?_ Innogen Bashir? That’s you?” Gwendolyn asked, not waiting for an answer. “He’s your kid?”

“Yes.” She swallowed and let the tears come as they would as she stood and clapped. “That’s my child.”


	33. What A Good Boy

Overlaying Bajor’s twenty-six hour-long days onto Earth’s twenty-four wasn’t quite the same straightforward shuffling that was London to San Francisco – it wasn’t a set time change she could memorize and apply when necessary. A pair of clocks by her study’s comm terminal only helped so much; there was a lot to Julian’s schedule she didn’t know and couldn’t learn. His status as Chief Medical Officer meant there was always the chance of being called away from his free time by emergencies.

Without either of them intending to, they found themselves composing letters again. Not writing as they’d once done, not with the weeks in between ships ferrying physical goods making their stops at Earth and Bajor, but composition, hundreds of words saved up and shared when a few minutes or some hours could be spared to put them together and send them out. Julian sent her pictures of his quarters, of the wormhole, the station itself taken not from a dispassionate newscast but a personal viewpoint from someone who lived there and might even come to know it as home one day. He sent her images of Bajor as well, talking of the fruit there, of having to mandate his own spending and currency allowances. There was some time to read, which he’d worried about, and there was plenty of time for racquetball, which he hadn’t.

Innogen wrote back about what he asked after and other things he didn’t. She told him about the agency’s politics and accounts, how glad she was when she had enough time free to go to movie theatres and art museums more than once every three months, what was in and out at the farmer’s markets and what was growing in the gardens and the parks. And with enough effort, the two of them could talk about their lives to each other face-to-face, Innogen in her study and Julian in his quarters. Sometimes Olivia joined them, but more often than not, it was a different sort of family affair.

“Everyone here’s gearing up for the Bajoran Gratitude Festival next week,” Julian said. “It’s only the second official celebration of it since the Cardassian withdrawal – it’s a day-long festival, sunrise to sunrise, that’s set aside for celebration and renewal and giving particular thanks to those in your life you’re grateful for. In a lot of ways it almost reminds me of a giant Shabbat, or Rosh Hashanah, or Simḥath Torah. I went to one –”

“Wait just one moment.” She adjusted the comm’s volume again. “There. Sorry about that. You were saying about Simḥath Torah?”

“Oh? Yes. I mean, I didn’t go to services _often_ , but sometimes it was nice – I never knew anyone there, so I could slip into the back and just listen, get up with everyone else, take the time to just think about where I was. Anyway, one year I went to Simḥath Torah at the synagogue right by the reservoir, right near there, and if you haven’t been to one of those, you _really_ have to go, everyone was dancing around the place, taking the torahs out of the ark and dancing with them too, and the Gratitude Festival reminds me of that, how it’s not quite thanking the Prophets themselves – you know, the god-figures the Bajorans worship?”

“I’ve been doing some reading about them. Go on.”

“Right, so you _can_ thank the Prophets during the Festival, but it’s primarily for the world around you, so most people don’t. What they do sometimes is burn scrolls with their concerns and problems written on them to symbolically remove them from their lives, and no, it’s not casting out sin, they don’t quite have that concept. Not that I could manage to communicate to anyone, at any rate. They might. I know a cultural researcher who’s focusing her work on the Bajoran cultural revival, she might know better words to use to ask than I do.”

“That sounds like a very good plan.”

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to manage it. Everyone here’s preparing for the Festival, even her. I’ve been working to make sure all the relevant shifts are covered and that everyone who can be on call will be on call when it’s over. Last year – well. Last year was the first Gratitude Festival I’ve ever seen, and it gave me a good idea of what I need to do this year.”

“Do you think it’ll all go smoothly?”

“I rather hope it does,” he said, smiling.

Innogen kept encouraging him to talk, to make the most of this rare time they had. Making sure they could talk like this, speaking properly without anything in the way, soaking up the information about a life she couldn’t say belonged to her and her alone any longer, trying to listen for hints about friends from what Julian wasn’t saying to her. She couldn’t tell him how she still worried about it from time to time, not without pressing him in a way to make him twist away and not speak. It was easier in writing, but in writing, she couldn’t see his hands flutter through the air or his chin jerk up just slightly or his smiles. In writing, there wasn’t any way to hear his voice.

They had only so much time to talk, and soon, it was time to say good-bye.

“You’ll be well now, yes? Take care of yourself.”

“I will, Aunt Innogen.”

“I love you.”

“Likewise,” he said, and cut the comm. Like he always did. Not quite able to say the words, finding ways around that to let her know what he would say if he could manage, saying it without saying it.

She rested her head in her hands, took a few deep breaths, steeling herself.

Then she turned and looked to her right, where Richard and Amsha had been listening in just outside of the comm’s view, Amsha curled up in her glider and Richard leaning against the wall.

“Was it loud enough this time?” she asked them.

“Yes, thank you,” Amsha said. “He sounds well.”

“He’s doing well.”

“It’s so different to hear him when it’s like this, not just from a newscast. To hear him, even like this –”

“When will you let us speak to him?” Richard asked.

“Pardon?” Innogen swore at herself; whenever she spent time around him her accent always washed back to the old Estuary sounds.

“Would you ever consider letting us even _watch_ when he comes calling?”

“No, I won’t. You know that.”

“I’d just like to –”

“Yes, I know what you’d like to, and that’s why I can’t.”

“Please don’t,” Amsha said to Richard. Turning back to Innogen, “Please. You know how grateful we are you share him with us, we’re glad for everything, and you understand how long it’s been since we’ve really seen his face.”

“I do.” She stood, holding herself tall. “And you understand that if Julian had any idea you listened when he called, if he had _any_ idea _at all_ , he’d never call me again.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Richard said.

“I’m not. He’d stop calling, he’d stop writing letters, he’d cut off as much contact with me as he could if he knew I shared it with you. He’s that afraid of you.”

“Afraid?” Amsha asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s – why would he be afraid of us?” Richard demanded. Innogen didn’t answer. “This is a goddamn – it’s been twenty bloody years, Innogen, you’d think he’d try to find a way to see what we’d done. Why we’d done it. We’d been trying to look out for him, and if –”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Richard, you hadn’t been doing it for Julian. You’d tried to get it done for you.”

Richard glared at her, drew in a breath, and didn’t let it out when Amsha stood and touched his shoulder gently, as Innogen sometimes touched Julian’s, and instead of letting loose a tidal wave of righteous anger, he shook off her hand and stalked downstairs. They watched him go, and Amsha looked to Innogen.

“I’m sorry.” She’d looked so tired when she’d returned from Mars. Being on Earth helped somewhat, but she still looked so much older than she rightly ought to. None of this was as it rightly ought to have been, but it was what they had.

“It’s really quite all right.”

“Is he?”

“Is Julian that scared of you? Absolutely.”

Amsha nodded. “I suppose that’s fair.” Innogen didn’t say anything. She just reached out and took Amsha’s hands in her own. Tough, sturdy hands, unfit for a woman of this day and age, of the mother Amsha had wanted so badly to be. Woodworker’s hands. She’d needed a craft to occupy herself on Mars, and Richard had picked one after another and moved through half a dozen before finally settling on grounds-keeping while Amsha had waited and deliberated and went with woodworking from the start. An old craft, she’d never shared any of it while in prison, and only began sharing once she’d gotten out, nearly ten years ago. Thirteen years since she’d spoken to her son, ten since she’d gotten out of prison – ten years since Julian had lived in England.

He hadn’t been their child for a long, long time.

“Did…” Amsha tightened her hold and shook her head. Innogen watched hope win out. “Did he like the hamsa?”

“He did.” 

“Thank you,” she smiled, and Innogen felt her heart run sorrow; for all that Amsha loved her son now, she hadn’t, long ago. Innogen had needed to learn to love Julian, and he had been so happy to love her even before she’d loved him, all she could have done was love him.

She wished his parents had been able to do the same.

And she let go.


	34. Afterword - "the sweetest woman"

_JULIUS: I think we can do something with that.  
HERBERT: Oh, I bet you can. I can see it now, the lonely little girl befriended by empathetic aliens who teach her how to smile. It's enough to make you go out and buy a television set. Next.   
– “Far Beyond the Stars”_

For all I joked about using _Worlds of Deep Space Nine: Earth_ as the title for this story, writing that book was one of my goals when I began working on it. I’ve wanted to know what living on Star Trek’s Earth is like for quite some time, and using a Federation civilian to explore the nuts-and-bolts of everyday life – getting towels from utility replicators instead of Bed Bath  & Beyond, public transportation options, how Humans look at disability after the Eugenics Wars – struck me as the best way to accomplish that. Find someone I wanted to read about, write their story, and see what I learned along the way.

My other major goal was much more straightforward, and also much more difficult: learn about Innogen Bashir. I didn’t think I had any desire or inclination to do so when I put her into “Stubborn Mouths” because all I’d needed was a name and a figure who’d been present in Julian’s childhood. MemoryBeta mentioned him having an aunt, but nothing beyond her having been kind to him during his childhood. Nothing on which side of his family she was from, where she lived, or who she was as a person. She was simply the answer to the question of who raised Julian after his parents’ arrest. Then I started to wonder about that period in Julian’s life. What Innogen’s life was like before he came into the picture, and how she took the changes his arrival brought. Whether the acceptance was immediate, if and how much she struggled, the ways she adjusted and found a new equilibrium. What it took for her to fully come to terms with the fact that her life wasn’t going to be the same, and how to do so with grace.

I wanted to write the story of how Innogen Bashir went from insisting she be allowed to go out dancing to declaring Julian was her child.

I’d intended “Stubborn Mouths” to be a one-off, and two-thirds of the way through it I realized that wasn’t meant to be. So I didn’t fight it, and went ahead and did what I could to discover Innogen’s story.

(And yes, the blond-haired man with the insincere smile is exactly who he’s supposed to be.)

-

For hand-holding, cheerleading, signal boosting, spot-checking wording, draft accountability, therapy consultation, Tuckerization, musical services, and generally keeping me on the right track, I’d like to thank [AnneTheCatDetective](http://annethecatdetective.tumblr.com/), [Bmouse](http://bmouse.tumblr.com/), [brin_beltway](http://brin-bellway.tumblr.com/), [JustAMus](http://justamus.tumblr.com/), [Raven](http://singlecrow.tumblr.com/), [reasonablysunny](http://reasonablysunny.tumblr.com), [sssibilince](http://sssibilince.tumblr.com), [Sputnikhearts](http://sputnikhearts.tumblr.com/), [theoldaeroplane](http://theoldaeroplane.com/), [Tinsnip](http://tinsnip.tumblr.com/), and the regulars at [DS9 Rewatch](http://ds9rewatch.tumblr.com/), with the hopes I haven’t forgotten anyone.

For providing in-depth beta reading, Britpicking, catching the cameo, and telling me exactly what was missing, particular thanks goes to [serricoj](http://serricoj.tumblr.com) and [Zigraves](http://Zigraves.tumblr.com).

And to the band that provided the soundtrack: a final word of thanks to the stalwart, sorrowful, stupendous Barenaked Ladies.


End file.
